The Fett Twins
by Lucillia
Summary: Fett takes Luke and Leia to raise as his own. Bail Organa takes Leia back and has her memory erased from when she was taken to when she was returned to him. Her lost memories return on the Death Star. Star Wars with Luke and Leia as Bounty Hunters.
1. Prologue: Witnessing a Birth

Boba Fett worked the controls of his father's ship one-handed as a hastily made sling held his broken left arm against his chest. His last bounty hadn't gone quite as planned, and he'd nearly died in the struggle that had ensued when he had attempted to capture his target. As a result he had been forced to kill his target instead of bringing him in alive as he had planned and darn near got himself killed attempting to do. The cooling corpse in the cargo hold was now worth half as much as he would've been had he still been alive. The commotion the struggle between himself and his target had caused had come to the attention of the local Security forces who wanted to bring him in for questioning, postponing his search for medical attention. Getting offworld as quickly as possible had been the best option in this case, considering the reputation of said Security forces. The CSF - which had never been known for their kindness towards suspected law-breakers - had nothing on these guys. Fortunately for him, there was a medical center of some sort on an asteroid a couple of systems away.

While most thirteen year-old boys were watching Swoop races, dreaming of the day they'd be behind the controls of their own swoop bike, and discovering the fact that girls weren't really all that icky, Boba Fett was making his way in the galaxy as a bounty hunter. In the three years since his father's death, he had been forced to grow up rather quickly and learn how to fend for himself using all of the things his father had taught him when he had the time.

With a great deal of difficulty, he landed his ship on the landing pad for the medical center that had been listed in his father's records. According to his father's rather copious notes on the various medical facilities around the galaxy, the place was well equipped, and staffed with personnel that didn't ask too many questions. As the ship touched down, he noted that several other ships were also occupying the landing pad. Hopefully, the wait time wouldn't be too long, as he'd had to deal with his broken arm for several hours already.

As he entered the main facility and headed towards the examination room that had been assigned to him, he noticed a bit of a commotion at the end of the hall. If he hadn't seen the Jedi, he would've chosen to mind his own business, and gone on to get his arm treated never knowing of his close brush with history. Knowing that whatever the now outlawed Jedi was doing was going to be of interest to any number of parties including the newly born Empire, he headed over to the end of the hall to see exactly what was going on.

Outside of one of the treatment rooms, two security guards from Alderaan that were of the type that guarded dignitaries rather than the sort that policed the streets and stuck their noses into things that weren't their business if the uniforms were to be believed were standing on either side of the door. Half expecting the guards to question him or more likely send him away, he peered into the small window next to the door that was meant for the patient's visitors who couldn't enter the room for various reasons (contamination risk, too many patients in room, visitor shedding or moulting, etc.). The guards, only seeing a child since he was still a bit small for his age since he hadn't yet hit his growth spurt, apparently didn't think he was a threat and ignored him, which was a rather stupid thing to do really, as he could think of at least a half dozen ways he could hurt the person they were guarding if he had wanted to, even in his current condition.

Inside the room, Senator Amidala of Naboo lay on a treatment table being tended to by a couple medical droids. Seated nearby was the Jedi who the HNE reporters had called "The Great Negotiator", Obi-wan Kenobi. As the droids bustled about the senator, she called out for someone who, if his lip reading was correct, was named Anakin. Anakin was the first name of Knight Skywalker who was called "The Hero Without Fear" by the HNE news networks, and who had fought at the "Great Negotiator's" side throughout the entire war. One of the droids treating the senator presented her with the male infant that it had just removed from a rather ugly looking incision in her abdomen. She named the boy something that started with Lu. Moments later, the senator was presented with a female infant which she named something two syllables starting Le and ending in a, most likely Leia or Leila. Moments later, after saying something to Kenobi, Senator Amidala was dead.

Being entirely focused on the scene before him, it was understandable that he didn't register the fact that there was someone else in the hallway until he felt something smack into his right leg. When he looked down in search of the source of the pain in his leg, saw the Jedi Master Yoda standing next to him holding his walking stick aloft. Scowling, he said nothing and turned to look back into the now deceased senator's treatment room in case anything else of note happened. He wasn't even going to try to pick a fight with the little green troll who had practically run the Jedi order for several centuries in his condition. As his father had told him any number of times, there was no point in starting a losing battle no matter how much you wanted to get revenge against your opponent. While he rather determinedly ignored the diminutive Jedi, the little troll hit him with the stick again.

"What do you want?" he snarled at the Jedi Master after he'd been struck for a fourth time.

"Ask you to keep quiet about this I do. Get your arm treated you should." Yoda said to him, prodding him with the stick with each sentence before pointing towards the treatment room he should have been occupying.

Knowing that it was pointless to stay since he'd just be hit with the Jedi's walking stick until he left, he turned to leave in order to save himself some unnecessary pain. As he walked down toward the treatment room to which he had been assigned, he heard Kenobi tell Yoda that the twins whose birth he'd just witnessed were the last hope for the Jedi Order, possibly even the galaxy.

As the Bone Knitters worked on his arm, he contemplated what he had just seen. Apparently Anakin Skywalker had been having some sort of affair with the senator from Naboo which had resulted in children, children whom the remnants of the Jedi order were now in possession of, and would possibly use to rebuild said order once again. That wasn't his main concern at the moment though, the badly done C-section he'd witnessed worried him greatly, because if the medics here could botch a rather common surgery, they could just as easily botch the repair of his arm. When he got out of here, he was going to get his arm examined by another medical professional to make sure it was alright ASAP. For now though, he'd go with getting it fixed enough that he would be able to manage until he found another doctor.

He knew that the scene he had witnessed was valuable somehow, and he decided that he would sit on the information until he found the right buyer, as in the sort of buyer that would pay a great deal for his account of what he had witnessed, and wouldn't turn on him and kill him the instant he shared the information. He ended up sitting on the information for the six years, during which he had become a Journeyman Protector, started a family of his own, and left them after being exiled from Concord Dawn.

**Edited 3/12/2012**


	2. Taking Luke

Luke Skywalker jumped up and down in excitement as he headed to the garage where the family speeder was kept. Today was his sixth birthday, and since the harvest had gone so well this year, Aunt Beru was taking him shopping in Anchorhead for his present. She said that he could even fly the speeder this time too! Upon reaching the Lars family speeder, he hopped excitedly in place near the driver's side as he waited for his Aunt Beru to come out of the house.

"Easy Luke, if you keep that up, you will tire yourself out long before we get to Anchorhead." Beru said once she reached her excited nephew, before ruffling his hair and laughing.

"Well, let's go then!" he practically yelled, dancing with impatience as he flattened his hair back down.

Smiling, Beru climbed into the speeder and set Luke on her lap. She watched in amusement as the small boy carefully backed the speeder out of the garage with a most serious expression on his face as he did so. Once they were out and into the open desert, the boy smiled brightly and turned the speeder toward Anchorhead, flying to the small town at a speed she considered to be much too fast, which left her with the desire to cling to something for dear life.

As they hurtled along, Beru wondered if the woman who would have been her mother-in-law had felt the same while riding with Luke's father.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett wandered around the pitiful excuse of a marketplace that ran along the main thoroughfare of Anchorhead. If it weren't for the fact that Jabba the Hutt payed so well, he would have entirely avoided this godsforsaken litterbox of a planet. The vast majority of what was available for purchase at the various temporary stands and more permanent stalls in the sand covered village he was wandering through while he was between jobs was junk, but on occasion he had found valuable items at markets similar to this one, and that was what had kept him browsing. As he glanced briefly at the stall next to him - where a collection of broken-down garbage was on display - a laughing child ran into him.

He looked down at the child who had the audacity to run into him, as most creatures of its ilk went out of their way to avoid him. It was a scrawny boy who had most likely come from one of the moisture farms in the area who had blonde hair, blue eyes, clothes that appeared to be at least third hand which was practically par for the course in this sector of space, and a hand shaped bruise on his left cheek.

"Luke," A woman's frantic voice called across the marketplace as he examined the uncommonly brave or rather uncommonly stupid child. "Luke, where are you? Come back."

"I'll be right there Aunt Beru." The boy yelled in the direction of the woman who had been calling out for her lost child before turning, running, and calling an apology out over his shoulder on his way back to his aunt.

After doing a subtle pat down and finding nothing missing which was somewhat surprising considering his current location, he decided to ignore the incident and continued wandering the marketplace hoping to find something useful, but seriously doubting that he would. He was about to give up his search and leave when he once again spotted the child who was now standing next to a woman who thanks to a hard life in the desert looked older than her (possibly) thirty years who was talking to someone in rather familiar brown robes. His attention caught, he studied the man more closely. Though he had copious amounts of grey hair and the desert had prematurely aged him, the man had a face that Fett would never forget. It was the Jedi Obi-wan Kenobi.

Curious about the Jedi's intentions, he decided to listen in on the conversation that was taking place between him and the woman. What did the Jedi have to do with this woman and child, and would the information about what he saw and heard make up for the valuable time he'd wasted wandering around this shit heap of a marketplace?

"...Owen wouldn't like..." Said the worried looking woman who protectively pulled the boy a little closer to her as she and the Jedi spoke.

"He needs to begin his training Beru, he should've started it years ago." Kenobi said to the woman who didn't seem too happy about the prospect.

He wondered why the Jedi persisted in attempting to take the boy when it was clear that the family didn't want their child to be trained. Outside the few forced surrenders when a planet's Children's Services had turned a child over to the Jedi order after it had been removed from its parents' custody, the Jedi were supposed to leave the decision about whether or not a child was to be trained up to the family. If the family said no, the Jedi were supposed to leave them alone. Why this Jedi was stupid enough to risk training a child in the first place when the Empire was busy hunting them all down and killing them, he didn't know.

He studied the small child that the argument was about. The boy seemed vaguely familiar. In fact, now that he thought about it, the child looked a great deal like the holo of Anakin Skywalker after he'd won the Boonta Eve Classic that he had in his memorabilia collection. His father Jango had been a Podracing enthusiast, and had shared his passion with his son, constantly showing him his collection of holos of the winners of the major races. The smiling face of the only human winner ("Cheating Jedi") had stuck in his memory at the time his father had shown him the image because the boy in the image had been only a few years older than he was when he first saw it at the time it had been taken. The few times he had brought out his father's collection, Skywalker's was the first image he would look at.

He had met Skywalker himself more than once during the Clone Wars. At one point, Skywalker had helped him repair the Slave I after it had crashed, and had done a damn good job of doing so. While he had a hatred for all Jedi, he didn't hate Skywalker nearly as much as he had hated say, Mace Windu for boy standing next to the woman had the same eyes, nose, and smile as Skywalker had at the age of nine. That smile had changed a great deal by the time he had met Skywalker durning the Clone Wars, having become far less innocent and carefree.

As he stood there watching the child and his companions, he came to the realization of exactly who the child was, and nearly hit himself for not realizing it sooner considering who he had been comparing the boy to. The boy was one of the two children who had been born to Senator Amidala exactly six years earlier. Kenobi had apparently hidden him and his sister here on this out of the way planet with their relatives in order to train them in secret. It was a rather stupid thing to do considering the fact that all it would take would be the wrong person such as one of Anakin Skywalker's childhood friends or former owners or someone who had a holo from the race Skywalker had won recognizing the boy for their cover to be blown. Kenobi's plan had apparently backfired anyways, since the family he had entrusted the twins to had decided that they wouldn't be trained.

"But Owen said..." the woman trailed off weakening, starting to give in to the Jedi's demands. It seemed that Kenobi would finally have his way, and the boy would start his training to be a Jedi soon.

He looked back down at the small and currently helpless boy. It would be a so easy to aim his blaster at the child and pull the trigger. He could almost see the look of stunned shock on the Jedi's face as the "Last hope for the Jedi Order" was killed right in front of him before he could even be trained. But, he had vowed never to harm a child if he could help it, and the mini Jedi was no exception. The child wasn't to blame for the actions of the Jedi who were using him as a pawn in whatever game they were playing with the Sith this time.

As he watched the argument continue, an idea began to form in his mind. The child and his sister were young and untrained, and could easily be taught to hate the Jedi. He almost smiled as he pictured the Jedi Order's last hope killing off the last of that hypocritical order before it could be rebuilt once again. That would be a much sweeter revenge against those who killed his father, and if his memory served him, had a hand in killing the children's mother as well considering the fact that the medical droids at Polis Massa weren't usually anywhere near as incompetent as they had been when treating Senator Amidala. Raising the boy and his sister who was apparently elsewhere at the moment would be doing them a favor. If the bruise on the boy's cheek and the state of his clothes were any indication, he was not being well cared for.

Taking the children here in the marketplace was not an option. The commotion it would cause and the ensuing fight with the Jedi, while satisfying, would be too much of a risk, and there was a good chance that one or both of the children would be caught in the crossfire. That, and if he acted now, he would have a much harder time getting the sister who was quite likely wandering about somewhere nearby, a sister that he hadn't seen yet and didn't have any idea as to what she looked like, increasing his chances of grabbing the wrong child if he went after her. He would have to get the children closer to home where he would have a better chance of getting them both at the same time with little to no interference from the Jedi who had allowed the Beru woman to return home with her nephew to "Talk it over with Owen".

&!&!&!&

Owen winced as he once again saw the bruise on Luke's cheek. He hadn't meant to hit the child that hard, it was just that the boy had to learn not to use the Force, even by accident. The Empire was still hunting the Jedi, and all those with Jedi powers, and wouldn't hesitate to kill Luke or worse if they found him. Owen cared for his step-nephew as if he were his own son, and didn't want to see him harmed. Here, on this farm, away from that dangerous fool Kenobi was the safest place for the boy. If Kenobi approached Luke again as he had earlier today, he would get more than a stern talking to.

He handed Luke the model ship that he had made him for his birthday and told him to go play outside while Beru fixed dinner. Luke was smart enough to stay close to the house, and there hadn't been any signs of Sand People for months. The boy would be fine on his own for a couple of hours while he dealt with that malfunctioning harvester droid.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett had discreetly followed the woman Beru and her young charge home from the marketplace, wondering why she had only brought the boy into town considering the fact that the trip had been for the twins's birthday. The woman allowed the child to pilot the speeder home, which the boy did with a great deal more skill than most children that age, proving that he was his father's son. He had considered taking the child while they were en route from Anchorhead, but realized that he would most likely have to injure or kill the woman to do so, which would most likely severely traumatize the boy and put him in a position where he would not be willing to be in his care.

He knew that for his plan to work, he would have to raise the boy himself to ensure that he was kept away from any of the other remaining Jedi. This would be somewhat difficult without any added complications since he knew next to nothing about childcare, as his wife had been the one to tend to their daughter. Fortunately, the boy and his sister were at an age where they could mostly take care of themselves, and only needed occasional supervision. For the most part, he would just have to keep them out of trouble, and teach them what they needed to know to survive in the galaxy as his father had taught him.

He was currently watching the moisture farm at which the boy and his sister whom he had yet to see lived from a distance, waiting for his opportunity. Knowing from the experience of prior surveillance missions that he would most likely be waiting a long time, he had made himself comfortable. Nearly an hour into his vigil, the boy ran from the house alone, holding a model of a freighter aloft as if it were flying, playing one of those incomprehensible games that children that age were wont to engage in. The sister was nowhere in sight, and he was beginning to think that she had died at some point in the past, as discreet thermal scans of the farm showed only one child on the infrared.

Realizing that this was probably his best chance of getting his hands on the boy before Kenobi claimed him as the woman was busy preparing the evening meal, and her husband was otherwise occupied, he acted fast. A stun bolt swiftly dropped the boy before he even knew what had hit him. The instant he was down, he swiftly came in on his speeder bike, quickly dismounted, grabbed the boy, got back on, carefully situating the boy so he wouldn't fall off, and flew away at a speed that would put several professional racers to shame.

He was almost out of sight when Owen and Beru came out to see who had just visited their farm.

&!&!&!&!&

When Owen came up from the house, he saw one of Jabba the Hutt's bounty hunters flying off in the distance. Why the man had decided to buzz their farm, he had no idea. He decided to bring Luke inside where he would be safe in case either the man came back or someone else was hanging around for whatever reason. He called for the boy, and he didn't come. He called again, no response.

He began frantically searching around the farm for Luke, hoping that the boy had just decided to play some sort of prank or had just wandered off too far to hear him even though he had told the boy a million times to stay close to the house. He examined each sand dune near the farm hoping all the while that a certain shaggy blonde head would pop up smiling and giggling. The boy had buried himself in one of the dunes once as a prank, and that was what he hoped and prayed that the child was doing now. As he searched the dunes near the house, he swore that he would give the child a punishment he'd remember for the rest of his life for scaring him so badly.

As he poked at a dune near his parents' graves that looked like it had been recently disturbed, he heard Beru yell for him to come. He ran to his wife as fast as he could, hoping that she had found Luke uninjured, but fearing the worst. When he reached her side, he learned that she hadn't found Luke. There, lying on the sand berm that they often stood on to watch the suns set, was the toy freighter that he had given Luke less than an hour earlier. The bounty hunter hadn't simply buzzed their farm as he had originally thought, he had taken Luke.

Owen Lars held his crying wife, doing his best to be a steady support for her while his own heart was breaking. Luke had been a light in their lives, the miracle that had turned up when he and Beru had learned that they could not have a child of their own.

**Edited 3/12/2012**


	3. Taking Leia

Boba Fett raced back to town with the unconscious boy, looking over his shoulder the entire way in case the child's former guardians had decided to pursue him despite his sizable head start and the risks of doing so. He would have to be gone by the time the alarm was raised amongst the other moisture farmers and just about everyone on the sparsely inhabited planet would be on the lookout for the boy. The farmers on Tatooine could be quite fierce when one of their own was taken, and didn't want to have to go through the hassle of fighting them.

After setting the child down in the room he had rented when he returned to Anchorhead since he didn't want to be flying after dark which was a dangerous proposition at the best of times in these parts, he took off his armor, tossed on some street-clothes he kept in case he needed to get away from somewhere unnoticed, and headed down to the local version of one of the numerous convenience stores that littered the galaxy to make a couple of purchases.

The next morning, when the first of the farmers arrived to have some words with Jabba's local representative, nobody paid any attention to the dark haired man carrying a sleeping boy who looked like he could be his younger brother or even his son considering how early some of the locals married to a slightly battered speeder bike, and left town.

When Fett reached his ship with his new responsibility in tow, he decided to place the boy in one of the capture cages until he could clean out the junk he kept stored in the small bunk his father had made for him long ago. After stowing the boy, he made a quick departure from the planet, swiftly getting his ship into hyperspace, and on a course for a world where he could pick up some reasonably good quality supplies for the child. Practically the instant the ship was safely in Hyperspace, he began looking a space in the cargo hold where he could stash the stuff that was on what had once been his bunk until he could sort through it.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke's head hurt when he awoke. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the metal bars of some sort of cage or cell. The second thing he saw was that his hand was the wrong color. In fact, all of him was the wrong color. Someone had kidnapped him and done something to him. Frightened and in pain, Luke curled up into a ball and cried out for his Aunt Beru.

&!&!&!&

Yoda sat in meditation on the planet Dagobah. As he connected himself to the Force, he felt what had been one of the most desirable of the possible futures that lay ahead wink out of existence. The Jedi order that he had served for nearly nine centuries would be no more after he was gone. Luke Skywalker, the one who would've rebuilt the Jedi Order, would become something else. He hoped that the boy wouldn't turn to the Dark Side as his father had done, and throw the galaxy into even greater chaos from which it would not recover.

&!&!&!&!&

It took two weeks for Fett to pull Luke out of his shell. Luke's early awakening in the capture cage had made for a very bad first impression. Locking the boy in his bunk so he wouldn't get into mischief after the child had tried to break something in order to stop the ship so they would have to return to Tatooine hadn't helped at all. Eventually, the boy started talking to him since there was no-one else to talk to, and he learned that Luke's sister might not have died as he previously thought. In fact, Luke never knew he had a sister, and there was a strong possibility that Luke's relatives hadn't known about her since they had never mentioned her. It would have been just like the Jedi to tear a family apart for no good reason. They had done it all the time before the Empire had destroyed their order.

On the fourth day of the second week after he had taken Luke, he learned exactly how the boy had gotten the bruise on his cheek. He had been looking around for a tool that he had misplaced when Luke closed his eyes and after a moment told him exactly where it was. The boy suddenly realized what he'd done, backed away saying that he hadn't hidden the tool and begged him not to hit him. It seemed that as well as refusing training, the boy's family or the boy's uncle Owen rather had tried to beat the ability out of him.

He decided then and there that despite his motivations taking the child had been a good thing. Who knew how far his "family" would've gone had the child's abilities continued to manifest? He decided that he was going to find Luke's sister as quickly as possible rather than take on another hunt to recoup the funds he had lost in taking Luke, before the Jedi trained her too much, or before the family they had given her to hurt her too badly. If they hadn't carefully vetted Luke's relatives before handing him over, odds were that they hadn't properly vetted whoever the hell it had been that they had handed his sister over to.

When he wanted to find someone, he found them. Finding Luke's sister would most likely be tricky, since after slicing into the Tatooine Vital Statistics database, he learned that Luke had been registered as a singleton on all of the forms the Larses had submitted, which included a fake birth certificate that had listed the boy's planet of birth as Tatooine. If Luke's sister hadn't already died, she'd most likely be on some other out of the way planet, registered as an only child, and most likely hidden with relatives on her mother's side of the family considering the fact that Luke had been left with his Step-uncle and his wife. Naboo would probably be a good place to start his search, since that had been the twins' mother's homeworld.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke stared in awe at the city of Theed on the Planet Naboo. Besides Tatooine, this was technically the second world he'd been on. He hadn't seen any of the first because he'd been locked in the bunk while the man called Boba Fett had gone out and gotten supplies. Fett had brought him here because they were going to look for his sister. Up until a couple of weeks ago, he never knew he had a sister, and even now he wouldn't be too sure if something hadn't kept telling him that he did.

After walking a long way from the capitol's spaceport, through the most amazing place he'd seen in his entire life, Fett had led him to a rather nice looking building that had a lot of children running around playing outside. The sign on the front of the building said that it was something called a daycare.

"You're going to stay here for a couple of days until I've determined whether or not I've gotten a lead on your sister." Fett said as he led him inside where a woman greeted them from behind a desk.

"What can I do for you sir?" The woman asked, dubiously eying Fett's armor.

"I'm going to be here on business for a couple of days. I can't bring the kid, and I can't leave him on the ship, and I heard that you were licensed to watch kids overnight." Fett said. The first thing he'd done upon landing on Naboo was to look for someone he could trust to watch Luke while he went out searching for the boy's sister. The comments various spacers had left about the Shadyside Daycare had been rather promising.

"Pay in advance. Anything more than a week and I hand him over to children's services, you're lucky that I don't hand him over now." The woman at the desk said somewhat coldly, which was a bit surprising considering the reputation the place supposedly had.

After the transaction was complete, Fett left. The severe looking woman who had frightened Luke when he first saw her turned out to be surprisingly kind. Apparently, whatever her problem had been, it had been with Fett. When she had finished registering him, she gave him a snack from the stash she kept behind her desk, and led him to a room that was far nicer than the one he had when he lived on Tatooine. It even had a chest full of toys and a shelf full of holobooks.

"This is where you'll be staying while you're here." the woman said as she showed him around the brightly painted room that had two sets of bunk beds as well as the aforementioned toy chest and bookshelf.

"The 'fresher is in here." she continued as she led him to a door on one of the walls

He stared at the small room that the woman had led him to. The 'fresher had something that was an unimaginable luxury on Tatooine, a real water shower. On the farm, and in the ship that he'd found himself on with Boba Fett, if you wanted to get clean, you used wipes.

"He doesn't hit you does he?" the woman suddenly asked.

"Who?" Luke asked confused by the question.

"Your father." the woman replied.

"My father's dead, he died before I was born." Luke said, wondering why she had called Fett his father. The man was just some guy who had taken him from Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, and wouldn't take him home no matter how many times he begged or pleaded for him to. He had said that some man called Kenobi would have taken him away anyway and gotten him hurt or killed, but he wasn't sure if he should believe him.

"Oh, I'm sorry." the woman said as she carefully fluffed the pillow on one of the beds.

"That's okay." Luke said, wondering if the woman really was sorry or just saying it to be nice.

"Who is he then?" the woman asked, wondering exactly what kind of relationship the man in the Mandalorian armor had with the boy he had dropped off. She hadn't seen many Mandalorians, and the reputation they had wasn't the best. In fact, she'd mostly heard them being described as a bunch of bloodthirsty savages who made a job out of what they would do for free, namely kill people.

"He says that he's going to take care of me, and not hit me like Uncle Owen did. I miss Aunt Beru though." Luke replied wondering where all these questions were going. He knew better than to mention the little fact that he'd been kidnapped. Fett would most likely hurt him if he did, and the Law Enforcement people didn't care about such things unless you had alot of money with which to pay them, and Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru didn't have very much money.

"Oh." the woman said, wondering what idiot had let a walking armory become a foster parent.

Two days later Boba Fett returned, rather upset. More than upset actually, he was royally pissed.

"She's not here." He said in response to Luke's first question.

"Why are you angry?" Luke asked somehow sensing that it had to do with something other than his sister.

"I'll tell you later, after we're in space." Fett replied as he pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to Luke. "I've got something for you."

"Who is she?" Luke asked as he looked at the flatpic that Fett had handed him.

"Your mother." Fett responded.

&!&!&!&!&

When Fett got back to the Slave I he tried to calm down and find a way to tell Luke that his mother's family had absolutely no idea he existed. When he had tried to tell them after failing to find Leia or Leila (whatever her name was), they had flat out refused to believe him, believing that Senator Amidala had one child that had died with its mother, and that he was running some sort of scam. He'd finally left when an angry Sola Naberrie called Security, since he didn't want to bring unwanted attention to either himself or the boy. Thanks to the Jedi, chances were that if he hadn't taken Luke, and the boy had tried to connect with his family when he was older, he would have been angrily turned away by relatives who thought he was playing a cruel joke.

It took a couple more days for him to find the girl that was most likely Luke's sister, and it gave him another reason to curse the Jedi. He had followed an off chance lead, remembering the fact that the guards outside Senator Amidala's delivery room had supposedly been from Alderaan, and that as he had left the facility when his arm was fixed he had seen what he could've sworn was Senator Organa.

As he studied the holo of the Alderaani princess that he'd copied off of a press release, he was almost one-hundred percent certain that the girl was Luke's sister. She bore a strong resemblance to a childhood holo of Senator Amidala that he'd picked up for Luke in a shop on Naboo. She also had the same smile as the man he believed to be her father had had as a child. Luke told him that the young princess looked like a holo he had seen of his grandmother Shimi when he saw her image.

Tearing a family apart was one thing, but this, this took the cake. A man who could have easily have afforded to take both children in had taken only one, whom he raised in the lap of luxury on Alderaan while he left her brother to be raised on a barely habitable sandpit amongst abusive relatives.

&!&!&!&!&

Leia Organa smiled up at the sun in the sky outside her six year-old girl was happy to be at the family's forest retreat, as this was a rare treat indeed. After swiftly grabbing her clothes for the day, she headed to the bathroom to shower and change. As soon as she was dressed and ready, she ran to her toy box and grabbed what was currently her favorite toy, a large red bouncing ball.

Ball in hand, she left her room and raced towards the door that led to the yard nearest the woods, noting that Guard Dakir was not on duty as she did so. Today would be a good day indeed.

Before she could reach the door, someone swooped down and picked her up, causing her to shriek in surprise. Her captor then started tickling her ribs, causing her to laugh and drop her ball.

"So, where's my little girl going without breakfast, hmmm?" Bail Organa said to his adopted daughter as he carried her towards the dining room.

"Put me down Daddy, I want to go out and play." Leia said through her laughter.

"You can go outside after you eat breakfast." Bail said as he set his daughter down in a chair in front of the family dining table.

Leia practically shoved two slices of toast in her mouth, and got reprimanded for doind so. She slowed down when she ate her porridge and some scrambled eggs that her mother had scraped onto the plate that had held her toast.

"Can I go outside now Daddy?" Leia asked the instant she'd washed down her breakfast with a glass of fruit juice.

"For heaven's sake, Bail let the girl go outside." Breha Organa said as she looked up from her breakfast.

"Fine, out you go Leia, be back in time for lunch." Bail said as he picked up his Caf and his morning report.

"Yay!" Leia yelled as she scooped up her ball and ran for the door once more.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett crouched in the woods near the Alderaani royal family's secret forest retreat. He wondered exactly how he was going to do this, since taking a princess is a great deal more difficult than taking a farm-boy. He had been surprised at how easily the security around the retreat had been breached, but considering the fact that a week earlier he had gotten close enough to the princess to get the genetic sample that confirmed that she was indeed Luke's sister, he shouldn't have been. The security forces on this planet were much too complacent.

He felt somewhat naked without his armor, but the discreetly placed scanners around the property would've immediately picked up the high metal content and the electronic devices that said armor contained and marked him as an intruder. Without his armor or any other non-organic objects on his person, he had been able to trick the low-tech perimeter sensors into thinking he was some sort of animal. He still kept low beyond the perimeter, and made sure his silhouette was unclear, since if any sensors he hadn't noticed recognized his shape as bipedal and therefore most likely sentient, they would send out an intruder alert and he'd be screwed.

Trying to lure the child into the woods would immediately give him away. As he was trying to figure out a way around that problem, a red ball bounced into the forest close to his hiding spot. Sensing that this was his opportunity, he hurried over to the ball, careful to keep out of sight of the yard, kicked the ball further into the woods, and hurried to a new hiding spot near the ball. His risk paid off moments later. The child came into the forest alone.

He pulled the cloth he had specially prepared out of his pocket, and waited for the child to come closer. When the girl was close enough to grab, he swiftly did so, pressing the cloth over her mouth and nose before she could scream. Based on the patrols he'd observed while, he had less than ten minutes before someone realized the girl was missing and came looking for her. He swiftly tied the unconscious girl to his back with a bit of cord that he had brought for this purpose, and silently stalked to the edge of the property as fast as he could under the circumstances.

When he got near the spot he'd marked as the weak spot on the inside edge of the perimeter sensors, he got on all fours and crawled through. On the other side of the perimeter, he quickly checked that the girl was secure and raced towards his carefully hidden speeder bike hoping that he'd be able to get out of there well before security arrived.

&!&!&!&!&

Breha Organa had been feeling too unwell to join her daughter outside, and had chosen to watch from the window as her child played happily in the yard instead. She worried about the girl's safety constantly, especially now. The family had come here in secret because a week earlier someone had gotten past the palace security in broad daylight.

Fortunately the intruder had only pulled Leia's hair and left. It had been almost as if the man had been mocking them though, telling them that he could've killed her child at any time he wanted to. There weren't nearly enough security guards here for her peace of mind, but this place was supposed to be a secret, and if they started moving security in, they would swiftly be found, and it would no longer be a safe place to hide in times of danger.

Leia was running around the yard in the back garden near the woods, tossing her favorite ball into the air and running after it. Normally, she would be playing with Winter, but Winter had been left back at the palace with Aunt Rogue and everyone else. After one especially enthusiastic toss which had most likely been meant to bounce off of a nearby tree, the ball went sailing into the forest. Leia hesitated for a minute, but instead of screaming about her ball being lost like Breha had half expected her to and like she would have done only last year, she ran into the woods after it.

Breha watched and waited. Any second now, Leia would be coming out of the trees proudly holding her ball aloft. Five minutes passed, Leia didn't return. Ten minutes passed, surely it wouldn't take that long to find a red ball in green and brown foliage. The guards watching the forest and the yard appeared to come to the same conclusion. As one, they entered the woods, thinking that Leia may have gotten lost. One of the guards came out of the woods carrying something less than a minute later. It was Leia's ball.

The guards searched the woods for several hours. There was no sign of Leia. The fact that she hadn't been found meant that there was hope that she was alive. At first, the guards had thought that she had gotten lost, and that they would find her at any moment, but five hours into the search, a quarter of a mile from the property line, one of the guards found a relatively fresh footprint that didn't match any of their shoes. Leia had been kidnapped.

Breha sobbed into her husband's arms. While she had sat and watched, her child had been taken from her. She should've known something was wrong when she hadn't come back after five minutes, she should've sent a guard after the ball instead of letting Leia get it. She should never have let Leia go outside. She should've done something other than sit back and watch.

Bail held his wife trying to be steady for her as his own heart broke. Leia had been a shining light in their lives. Breha couldn't have children, and Leia had been for them the child that Breha couldn't have.

**Edited 3/12/2012**


	4. Escaping Alderaan

Boba Fett sped back to the cheap rooms he was staying in under an assumed name at top speed, or rather as fast as he could go without catching the attention of the local law enforcement. He brought the young "princess" that he had taken from the royal retreat into the 'fresher where the hair dye and skin darkeners were already laid out and ready for use. He carefully applied them making sure not to miss anything. If he was going to get Leia off planet, he didn't want a pale spot on her skin or a brown patch in her hair to give her away. Once finished, he surveyed his work. He idly noted that with the dye, the seemingly vast differences in appearance between the twins had all but vanished.

Now that his task was complete, he would have to go tell Luke to put his contacts back in because they would be leaving soon. He'd left Leia's eyes alone because they were brown, and went well enough with her current appearance. The blue eyes that Luke shared with his late father did not go well with his.

He felt rather nervous as he approached the spaceport, as this was the part of the mission he'd assigned himself that could very easily go really wrong. The facts that he wasn't wearing his armor, and that the ship he was going to take wasn't his were making him feel unusually vulnerable already, which made him feel uncomfortable, since he didn't like feeling vulnerable at all. He had one slight advantage in this situation though. When the call went out, the security forces would be looking for one child instead of two. He would have to act calm and hope everything worked out.

Upon reaching the spaceport he shifted the sleeping, well, actually drugged, girl to his left arm so he could get at the chips that identified him as Jaster Skirata and the twins as his younger siblings if he needed to.

"Idents please." A rather alert looking security officer said as soon as they reached the spaceport entrance.

He pulled the three identichips out of his pocket and handed them to the security officer, not letting any of the unease that was roiling in his gut show on his face. He'd committed a crime that would be punishable by death on just about any world other than Alderaan, and he was very close to getting away with it.

"These seem to be in order." the officer said as he handed the identichips back "Though, I must say..."

"What?" he asked, wondering what this delay would cost him. The liner to Bespin would be leaving soon.

"Well, you'll probably find this ridiculous, but you look almost exactly like the clones from the Clone Wars." the officer replied, studying him a bit more closely than he would've liked.

"It's not that ridiculous actually, I've been getting that alot lately. It seems that my mother's first cousin on her mother's side was the original. People didn't start noticing the resemblance until I reached my mid-teens." he lied smoothly, hoping that the officer would buy it and stop looking.

"Really, is that so?" the officer said, the suspicious tone in his voice clearly stating that he didn't believe it, and he was more closely studying the kids. "You know, come to think of it, your brother and sister don't look all that much like you."

He briefly wondered what he should do next. If the officer requested a genetic analysis, it would prove that he was completely unrelated to the twins. That, and that he was a 99.8% match to the clones that had been mentioned. The slight difference in DNA was due to the genetic tampering the Kaminoans had done to his father's other clones.

"Well, they're adopted. After Dad died, I decided to take care of them." he lied. Technically, every word he'd said was true as the Larses had adopted Luke, but they added up to a false statement.

"Really?" the officer asked only slightly mollified. "Then I guess you wouldn't mind speaking with one of my superiors."

He was then led to said superior, a middle aged man with graying brown hair and green eyes who upon seeing him did a double take, making him wince as he realized that he should have dyed his hair or something. He'd never really thought much about his appearance, as his face was usually hidden by his helmet, but it was causing him some serious trouble now. The wink he got from the officer he was led to confused him though.

"Skirata, huh?" he said as he looked down at the idents "I met your "Dad" when I was working Security on Corusc...er the Imperial Center."

"Really?" he asked, wondering if he was going to start paying for some crime his dad's friend had committed. Kal Skirata had played fast and loose with the rules when it suited him, and those "boys" of his had been no better. He had enough bad memories of Ordo to last a lifetime.

"Great guy." the officer said before turning to Luke and kneeling until he was at eye level with the boy.

"So Fi, what do you want to be when you grow up?" the man asked.

"A bounty hunter." Luke replied without missing a beat.

The officer laughed at this before turning to Leia, noticing that she was still asleep. He poked her, and she shifted slightly but didn't wake up. The officer's eyes narrowed at this.

"Parja's afraid of space travel, but she really wanted to see Bespin. I figured it would be best for her to be asleep until we were offworld and I could calm her down in our quarters so we wouldn't make too much of a scene. Getting on the ship to Alderaan had been a nightmare." he explained, hoping that the officer would buy the story.

"Ah. You wouldn't mind if we did a genetic comparison of those two would you?" the officer said. "We've got a missing girl that's about your Parja's age, and the family wouldn't be too happy if we let her slip by us."

"Not at all." he said, offering the child so the officer could take a genetic sample.

After a genetic analysis on the twins proved that the two of them were biological siblings, Fett was personally escorted to the liner headed to Bespin by the security officer who told Luke about the time a Republic Commando named Fi had thrown himself on a grenade, saving several people in the process, and how Kal Skirata had helped out in the hostage situation that Fi and his squadmates had been sent to help resolve. He wondered what that man would have done if he learned that thanks to his admiration of Kal Skirata's little band of misfits, he had let the missing "princess" slip right past him.

Once they were safely in his quarters aboard the liner, he gave the sleeping girl a sedative that would keep her out until they reached Bespin. The instant they reached Cloud City, he got his ship out of the long-term storage facility he'd had it placed in, and set off for the stars and possibly a bounty that would cover his losses in getting the young twins out of the hands of the Jedi.

One hour after entering hyperspace, he was awoken from his nap which had been the first sleep he'd gotten in nearly forty-eight hours by a brat who was screaming for her mother and father. He headed over to the bunk space that belonged to Luke, and now his twin sister Leia as well. Upon reaching the bunk, he saw that the girl was in the corner crying. Luke was on the other side looking uncertain as to what he should do. When she saw him, her eyes widened in fear.

"What are you going to do to me?" Leia asked as she tried to back even further into the corner she'd holed up in.

"Nothing." He replied, remaining in the doorway.

"But you're a bad man, and bad men hurt little kids." the child stated, staring up at him.

"I'm not a bad man. The man you call father was a bad man." He said, his anger at Organa over the man's complicity with the Jedi hadn't abated. The man could have easily taken in and cared for both children or neither for that matter if it had meant separating them, but he hadn't.

"My father is not a bad man!" Leia shrieked, her fear suddenly forgotten in the face of his accusation.

"You see that boy over there," he said, gesturing toward Luke who was silently watching the conversation "He's your brother, a-"

"No he isn't, I don't have a brother." Leia said cutting him off.

"Yes you do. When you were both babies, the man you call father took you away and left your brother to be given to people who hit him." he said, his anger at the Jedi rising once more. Neither child knew they had a sibling, and the Naberries never knew that Amidala's children had survived, all because the Jedi hadn't wanted to keep all of their eggs in one basket. Organa who was now also on his shit list had happily allowed the Jedi to tear the small family apart, just so long as he got a daughter out of the deal.

It was as he looked at the children who were now his responsibility, children who both feared him, one of whom humored him for fear of being hurt, that he realized how foolish he'd been when he'd gone through with his hastily thrown together plot. He had no idea how to take care of a child much less two, and the fact that he'd taken the both of them from families that they loved and cared for complicated matters. Then, there was the fact that using the children to get revenge on the Jedi would just about make him as bad as the Jedi who had taken them the day they were born.

Returning them to the families who had raised them was not an option, and giving them to their family on Naboo who were under the belief that they didn't exist would just place them back in the hands of the Jedi who would use them for their own purposes, that was if the Naberries even took them in the first place.

He could probably find Kal, and the two brats could become Fi and Parja Skirata in reality. Kal had been a sucker for kids that were caught in bad situations. He'd taken in six clones that were about to be scrapped after all.

When Leia had calmed down enough for him to enter the small space that housed the small bunk his father had made for him, which would soon need to be expanded to fit both children, he sat down between the children and began to tell them about the day they were born. Leia had interrupted once. He couldn't believe the crap she had been told about how her real mother had died. He'd seen the cut those damned droids had made, and was amazed that Senator Amidala had lasted as long as she did.

&!&!&!&

Obi-wan Kenobi had always regretted his actions on the day Luke and Leia were born, but the children were the last hope for the galaxy. At least the stronger one, Luke, was. This, and Luke's capture by Jabba's bounty hunter a couple months earlier had most likely been the cause of the dream he'd had last night. He had been sitting in the living-room of Senator Amidala's apartment. Across from him was a very familiar looking corpse, her eyes were lit from within by a strange glow and she spoke with a voice from beyond the grave.

"You knew I wouldn't give them to you." She said an accusing look on her face "That's why you did it, isn't it? Well, they're beyond your grasp now, and whether they save or destroy the galaxy is up to them. Nobody will use my children, not you, not the Emperor, nobody."

The scene had suddenly changed. He found himself sliding into a burning pit, there was someone in Mandalorian armor standing on a ledge above him, as he fell the man simply watched instead of trying to help. When he finally fell in, the man simply shrugged and walked off. The eyes behind the visor in the man's helmet were blue.

&!&!&!&!&

Kal Skirata who didn't move nearly as quickly as he used to, despite the fixed ankle, and who discovered a new ache or pain in one of his joints every morning thought that he was dreaming when he answered his comm which had woken him up in the middle of the night with its insistent chirping. Why else would Jango's brat whom he hadn't heard from in the nine years since Jango had died be calling him out of the blue?

He learned why else rather quickly. Apparently, the boy had gotten himself into trouble, and had wanted him to bail him out. For some reason that the boy claimed had to do with the Jedi, the idiot boy had kidnapped the Alderaani princess that was all over the news, and now that he had her and another kid he'd kidnapped, he didn't know what to do with them. Hence, the call.

He probably would have helped if bringing the children here wouldn't put his family including and especially Bard'ika and little Kad at risk. He had to weigh the danger toward him and his however against whatever assistance he could provide for Jango's brat, and Boba wasn't his, even though he could have been at one point long ago.

He gave the boy the only reply he could.

"You took them, they're yours." he said as he disconnected the call, and called for Ordo to change their comm code before the brat could call back.

He then got everyone up and told them to start packing for a vacation. If the kid came knocking, none of them would be home.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	5. A Fateful First Hunt

As the years passed, the people who had cared for Luke and Leia got on with their lives. While they grieved over the loss of the children they cared for and found themselves thinking about them at odd moments, time stopped for no-one, and they couldn't spend every day dwelling on their loss or they'd go mad.

Owen and Beru adopted a young orphan they had found starving in the streets of Mos Eisley. They had gone to get a part for the speeder that they couldn't pick up in Anchorhead, and had run into the child who had promptly tried to pick their pockets. Rather than leaving the child to his fate as most people would have done, they brought the boy home with them where he began to heal the hole that had been ripped into their hearts the day Luke had been taken, and they began to heal the hole left in his heart by the loss of his parents. The boy grew up happy on their farm, and showed every sign of wanting to continue the family business when it was his turn to do so.

Obi-wan Kenobi went back out into the galaxy where he did his best to aid in the fight against the Empire in any way he could. He briefly found Luke at one point, but just as quickly lost him again when Boba Fett came to the rescue and nearly killed him, getting the boy back.

Yoda stayed on Dagobah doing a task he had found to live for, hoping that the galaxy would find a way to work itself out once the Jedi Order was gone.

Bail Organa threw his time and effort into the Rebellion that was forming as the disparate groups that opposed the Empire banded together after Breha died, believing his little Leia to be dead since he'd never received a ransom note, nor found any evidence that Lord Vader had her. His friend General Riekaan would try to comfort him, telling him that she was alive since her body hadn't been found, and as long as her body wasn't found, there was hope, but it didn't do all that much good.

Out there in the galaxy, Boba Fett cared for and raised the children that he had taken for his own, eventually adopting them, and giving them his family name. As he raised the both of them, he wondered about Sintas and his daughter, how they were doing, and whether or not he should contact them. Though he and Sintas had loved each-other, there had been several factors that had torn their marriage apart including the fact that they'd been a bit too young when they had married. They had not parted under the best of circumstances, and Sintas hadn't tried to call him since then.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke and Leia Fett would be adults in another year according to Mandalorian tradition. Earlier that month, for their twelfth birthday, their dad had gotten them each a set of body armor and told them that they could hunt with him. This hunt wouldn't be easy, as they were after a high ranking officer in the new Rebel Alliance who had already escaped several other highly skilled bounty hunters.

Once the man was captured, their dad would hand him over to the Empire. They had to stay out of the way at that point because of the abilities they had been born with. Abilities which had caused the Jedi to murder their mother and kidnap them from their blood family. Abilities that would lead either to their execution or enslavement in the Empire if they were ever discovered.

_So, dad's going to flush him out and we'll nab him? _Luke silently sent to his sister. Their sibling bond could be quite useful at times.

_That's right. What are you asking me for anyways? You already know the drill. _Leia sent back slightly irritated.

_Just nervous. This is our first real hunt, and I don't want to mess it up _Luke sent as he checked the setting on his blaster once more.

_Here he comes, get ready_. Leia sent back, her excitement clearly evident even without the Force.

The man they were trying to capture came around the corner faster than they had expected. When he saw Leia who was using her natural appearance for this hunt since she'd gotten in trouble with some of the local law enforcement over her involvement in an illegal race the day before, he looked as if he had seen a ghost. That didn't stop the man from continuing trying to escape. When Luke and Leia finally caught up to him, it became immediately apparent that he had gotten a message out to someone.

_Shit, we messed up_. Luke sent, upset. His first real hunt where he got to aid in the capture rather than tend to the merchandise after it had been caught, and he screwed up.

_No we didn't, we caught him. _Leia sent gesturing with her blaster toward their unconscious prisoner.

_Yeah, but he had time to warn his buddies, and they'll escape before we can get the bounty on their little nest. _Luke pointed out.

_Not if we move fast_. Leia said, comming their dad and informing him of the situation.

A couple hours later, back on the Slave I, after a rather eventful morning during which a Rebel cell had been handed over to the local law enforcement who pretended not to recognize Leia in her current "disguise", Luke and Leia waited in front of the capture cage with the food tray until the merchandise woke up. When he did, the man stared at Leia once more looking as if he'd seen a ghost, completely ignoring Luke.

"I was right, it is you princess." the man, whom Leia recognized as a friend of Bail Organa's said.

"I'm not a princess." Leia said as she slammed the tray down in front of the captive. Some of the nutritive mush that they fed the merchandise in order to keep it alive until transfer slopped from the bowl.

"Don't you remember Alderaan?" the man asked completely ignoring the food.

"Of course I remember Alderaan. Dad rescued me from that place. Tell me, was Bail going to let the Jedi use me too, or were they just going to use my brother?" Leia responded. They had run into Kenobi a couple years earlier, and the man had tried to kidnap Luke. It had taken nearly a week to get him back, and Kenobi had managed to escape.

"Brother? You don't have a brother. The bounty hunting scum you call dad fed you a pack of lies. If you let me out I'll take you back home where you belong." the man said as he gripped the bars of the capture cage.

"Wrong answer. I'll just stay here where I know I won't get lied to. Dad told me the whole truth, or as much of it as he knew." Leia said as she walked to the small private bunk that her father had installed for her when he came to realize that she needed her own personal space away from the "boys".

"So, you're the so called brother I'll bet." the man said turning to Luke for the first time.

"There's no so called about it. It's been genetically proven several times over." Luke said. The man in the cage was really starting to get on his nerves.

"What's your name son?" the man asked, looking like he was going for a sympathy ploy.

"Luke Fett." Luke responded without hesitating. That was his name, had been his name for years, and the fact that it had been something else beforehand didn't change anything.

"I meant your real name." the man said.

"That is my real name." Luke replied. Boba Fett had formally adopted him and his sister when they were seven.

"I suppose that Fett "rescued" you too." the man said sarcastically.

"Yes he did." Luke said. His father had taken him before the Jedi could take him and get him killed in one of their harebrained schemes, so technically it had been true that his father had rescued him. He hadn't appreciated it at the time though, but now that he'd seen and heard what happened to the Force Sensitives that the Empire had caught, he had a better appreciation for what his father had done, and the risks he took every day they were with him.

"So, what was your name, and where did you live before you were "rescued"?" the man asked in an almost conversational tone as he idly played with the spoon that had come with his food.

The man was soon going to die, and any information he gave him would be useless, so he might as well answer him. Luke thought. He could treat it as the man's last request.

"My name was Luke Skywalker, I lived on Tatooine with my Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen." Luke finally said.

The man's eyes widened at the name Skywalker and he began to study the boy carefully, inaudibly muttering to himself under his breath the entire time.

_Damn, seems that people still remember my biological father_. Luke thought.

Several days later, a man who had been a security guard for, and close friend to Bail Organa went to his death with a head full of valuable secrets that had nothing to do with the Rebellion. Once he heard the story of the young twins, especially what Leia had to tell, the man realized that he would go to his grave with one regret, and that was that his message had gotten through to Alderaan.

&!&!&!&!&

Bail Organa reread the message he'd received from his old friend who was almost certainly dead now for the fourth time. The same unbelievable words he had seen the first time were still on it. He reread it a fifth time, and it still said:

Princess Leia alive, with Fett.

For the past six years, the notorious bounty hunter Boba Fett had kept his precious little girl captive for some unknown purpose. Very few things seemed to motivate the bounty hunter, and his primary motivation seemed to be money. He knew that the reason the man had kept his daughter couldn't have been money, because the man would have already sent in a ransom note or would have sold the girl to the highest bidder years ago. The only reason he could think that the man had kept his daughter was...Oh Force, not that!

A man who had once been a security guard for the young princess, and now worked for her father, looked down at the message Bail Organa had so carelessly left out on the datascreen on his desk when he had rushed out of the room in order to make arrangements for his daughter's retrieval. He would let his boss have his few moments of elation over the discovery that his daughter was still alive, since the princess wouldn't be alive for very much longer. Certain little secrets needed to be kept after all, and if they were discovered, things would go badly for him. Very badly.

&!&!&!&!&

Yoda stared at the possible futures that had been laid out before him by the Force. Many were surprisingly bright considering the fact that the Jedi order wouldn't be involved as anything other than a footnote in some history texts. The bounty hunter Fett had given the twins strength and a sense of purpose that would carry over to almost any path they chose. The Jedi Order would be gone, but there was the possibility of a galaxy in which it wasn't needed.

After he followed the ever-moving future for a while and found some much needed hope and comfort there, he focused on the task for which he now lived, feeding false futures to the Emperor and his minions so they didn't notice the direction the galaxy was taking until it was far too late to change course.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	6. Interlude: The Tale of Anakin Skywalker

THE STORY OF THE SKYWALKERS

(As told by Boba Fett.)

Boba Fett watched the brilliant pair of ten year-olds strip and clean their blasters without him reminding them for once. He was proud of them. Luke and Leia had already proven their worth several times over in the nearly four years that they had been in his care. They would both become excellent bounty hunters in their own right. Luke was an excellent shot as well as a phenomenal pilot, and Leia was an excellent mechanic as well as being extremely proficient with explosives and possessing negotiating skills that left him in the dust. Both children possessed the better traits of their biological parents.

As he watched the children work, he remembered the day when they were seven and had somehow acquired their own genetic testing kit...

"It's a match." they both said at the same time.

"So that means that what he told us..." Leia began.

"Is true." Luke finished.

After he'd taken both children in and had been told on no uncertain terms by Kal Skirata that they were his responsibility and that he wouldn't be getting any help from that quarter, he had compiled every fact he could about Anakin Skywalker, and had given the information to the twins in a format that he hoped that they would understand considering how young they were, a bedtime story...

_Once, many years ago, on the planet Tatooine, there had been a slave boy named Anakin Skywalker. He had lived with his mother Shimi and worked in the shop of their owner, a Toydarian named Watto, in the town of Mos Espa. The boy was very special. As well as being an exceedingly skilled mechanic, he could do something no other human could, he could survive and actually win Pod races._

_One day, about thirteen years before you were born, which was incidentally the year I was born, a Jedi got himself and the Queen of Naboo who was a girl called Amidala, stranded on Tatooine. In a successful attempt at getting the necessary parts for the queen's ship so they could reach Coruscant, the Jedi called Qui-gon exploited the boy's abilities. The boy ran and won the Boonta Eve Classic, after which, the boy's ownership transferred from Watto to the Jedi Qui-gon._

_Believing himself to have been freed by his new master who had failed to win his mother as well, the boy followed him to the Jedi temple and another form of slavery. Believing the Jedi's lies that this was a good opportunity for her son, and that she would see him again, his mother Shimi gave him her blessing._

_Usually, the Jedi only accept babies and toddlers which they have taken from their gullible families into the order, since such small children would be unable to remember or even contemplate a life anywhere else as they grew up with the Jedi. But, since Anakin showed such great potential, namely Podracing, and single-handedly destroying a Trade Federation Control Ship, they made a special exception for him, and inducted him into the order before he could learn about any of his other potential opportunities._

_For the next ten years, Anakin studied under a Jedi named Obi-wan Kenobi who had been Qui-Gon's student, not allowed to go back home and see his mother, or even contact her in any other way. _

_One day, when he was supposed to be guarding the former queen and then senator Amidala, and his master was poking his nose where it didn't belong on a planet called Kamino where my father and I were living, Anakin snuck back home to see his mother. After finding out that she had been bought and married by a man named Lars, Anakin raced over to the farm only to discover that she had been taken by Sand People, and that he had come in time to bring her body back for burial._

_He didn't have time to stay and properly mourn his mother's loss, because his master had gotten himself stranded on the planet Geonosis and needed rescuing. So, Anakin was forced to drag the senator to Geonosis where he, his master, and the senator were captured and sentenced to be executed as spies. During what was supposed to be the execution, a large number of Jedi showed up to rescue their comrades, and started the first battle of the Clone Wars, during which a member of their "esteemed" council named Mace Windu cut my father's head off._

_Some time during the Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker and Senator Amidala fell in love, which had been long forbidden by the Jedi who held to a code of non-attachment, and eventually started a family, which was also forbidden. Shortly before the two of you were born, the Clone Wars ended with the Jedi Order being declared traitors, and the Jedi exterminated. It was at that time that your father went missing and was presumably killed._

_The Jedi Master Obi-wan Kenobi, and the Jedi Master Yoda survived the initial purges and somehow discovered that Senator Amidala was carrying Anakin Skywalker's children. They took her to the medical facility at Polis Massa where she gave birth early, crying out the entire time for her lover Anakin._

_First, she gave birth to a boy whom she named Luke. He was given to the son of his grandmother's husband and his wife Beru who lived on a moisture farm on Tatooine. There, he was watched by the Jedi Kenobi who planned on taking him from the family that was raising him and using him to rebuild the Jedi Order. Instead of caring for him properly, his relatives who didn't know how to deal with his abilities had hit him. _

_(At this point Luke pointed out that his aunt never hit him)._

_Correction, his uncle hit him, and his aunt went along with the abuse hoping to avoid confrontation._

_Second, the senator gave birth to a girl whom she named Leia. This girl was neither given to her relatives on Tatooine where her brother was sent, nor to her grandparents on Naboo, but instead she was given to a man who had the means to, and could have quite easily taken both children, but only took one, a man who didn't care that he had separated her from the only family she had._

_Shortly after giving birth, senator Amidala died of a botched C-section. Kenobi claimed that it was a broken heart that killed her as I was leaving, but I had seen the incision and a five year-old with a pair of scissors could have done a much better job._

The children had many questions he didn't know the answers to after he had told them the story, but he vowed that he would find them if it were at all possible to do so.

He was brought back to the present by a click, Luke had finished reassembling his blaster first. Leia finished a second later. He inspected their blasters, both were perfectly cleaned and assembled. Yes, his children were good children, and they would go far. Senator Amidala and Anakin Skywalker never knew of the precious gift they had given him that long-ago day, but he couldn't imagine life without them.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	7. Leia's Gone to Alderaan

Luke knew something was wrong when Leia didn't call in like she was supposed to do when she went out alone for supplies. She was supposed to call in every hour to inform him and dad that she was still alive and that she was in good health, and not getting herself into trouble by entering Swoop bike races when she wasn't supposed to. Since, for Leia, getting supplies was a private thing because she was a girl and there were certain things only girls got and dealt with, and it would be embarrassing if he or dad tagged along, Luke was supposed to leave her alone until she called in. He told himself that he was worrying over nothing, and after a while, decided to ease his nerves by practicing a skill he'd recently discovered when he had been playing with one of his model ships. It had ceased to scare the shit out of his dad after the second time he did it.

"Luke, how many times have I told you to stop moving the damn ship, especially where there could be witnesses. Now put it back where I landed it in the first place, or I won't let you fly for a month." his dad yelled from somewhere in the inner workings of the hyperdrive."By the way, I have absolutely no idea how that modification you made to the hyperdrive works, by all rights, it shouldn't"

"Dunno either, something just told me it would work." Luke called back as he returned the Slave I to its original position as swiftly as possible. His dad always knew what punishments to dish out when he and Leia misbehaved.

"Did Leia comm you? She hasn't called in on the main line, and I've got a really bad feeling." He yelled when the ship was back to where it had originally been when it had landed at the out of the way spaceport his dad favored.

"Damn. Can you get any sense of where she is?" his dad asked as he ceased studying what his adopted son had done to the engines through the guidance of the Force, and became immediately alert. Leia was the punctual one, and if she was late, it meant trouble. Usually, it meant that she was getting herself into trouble, but on occasion it meant that she was in trouble. That, coupled with Luke's "Bad Feeling"...

"She isn't anywhere nearby." Luke said now extremely worried. Leia was supposed to stay near the spaceport, pick up her "necessary supplies", and grab something for their dinner, but she hadn't.

"What do you mean by not nearby?" his dad asked, sounding worried. They had all been a bit worried after that bit of merchandise had recognized Leia for who she used to be, but so far nothing had come of it despite the number of disturbing rumors they had heard.

"She's not on the planet or in the system!" Luke yelled in shock as he reached out for his sister and came up empty. How had he not sensed her leaving? Why hadn't he informed dad the moment that he felt something was wrong? Maybe if he had, they would've caught the scum that had taken his sister.

"Is she still alive?" his dad asked, now extremely worried and upset. If anyone harmed his Leia they would only live long enough to seriously regret their decision. If anyone touched either of his kids, there wouldn't be enough of them left to identify when he was through with them.

"Yes." Luke responded. That was the only good thing in this situation. Since Leia was still alive, there was a chance that they could get her back, and he was going to help his father dish out the punishment due to the asshole who had taken his sister.

"Do you know where she might be?" his dad asked. When they got Leia back, he would start getting his revenge by ripping out the guts of the person who had taken her. Nobody took what was his, Nobody.

"No." Luke said barely holding back tears. In the more than six years since they had been reunited, Luke had never spent more than a few hours away from his sister. The prospect of spending an indefinite period apart while who knew what happened to his sister frightened him.

"Then, let's go find out." his dad said as he climbed out of the hyperdrive and made his way to the cockpit. He would do whatever it took to get Leia back. They both would.

&!&!&!&!&

It had been Alderaani Royal Security who had taken Leia. No bounty hunter would dare go anywhere near "the kids that traveled with Fett", not even when offered an exorbitant amount of credits. A bounty hunter who had wanted to knock Fett out of the running during a particularly lucrative hunt had made the mistake of making a threat against the children. People who were in the know claimed that rangers were still finding pieces of the idiot who had been scattered across a nature preserve on an out of the way planet at the edges of the Outer Rim. Touching one of the children was pretty much acknowledged to be an automatic death sentence carried out by the toughest bounty hunter in the galaxy, and he could be pretty creative in that regard if even half of the stories they heard about him were true. Nobody wanted to know what the punishment would be for the idiot dumb enough to actually try and take one of them.

When Bail Organa got "his daughter" back, she was almost nothing like the little girl that used to think that he and Breha were the center of her little universe. Her universe had a new center, and she wasn't his little girl anymore. She was now a stranger called Fett.

He tried to hug Leia only to have her push him away, and give him a cold stare which he had last seen on Anakin Skywalker's face near the end, near when he had fallen and become Vader. What had happened to his daughter? What horrifying experiences had she gone through to make her this way?

"Leia, what happened to you? Did he hurt you? Did he touch you?" he asked praying that the answer would be no, but considering the kind of scum that killed for money, and the fact that the man hadn't tried to get money out of him when he had taken Leia...

"Unlike some people, dad never hurts children. Besides, I got enough of that here." Leia said coldly to the man who in her eyes had taken her from her family twice.

"What do you mean?" he asked dumbfounded, wondering what methods Fett had used to brainwash his daughter in order to keep her by his side, to keep her from getting help, to keep her from coming back home to him where she belonged.

"Not everyone in security..." was as far as Leia got before she collapsed.

He immediately called for a medical team who discovered the poison just in time to save Leia. Remembering Leia's accusation, had all of the security officers that had been near Leia since her return kept well away from her and investigated. After a long and frantic search for who could have possibly done this to his child, the culprit was found. The would-be murderer turned out to be one of his most trusted guards, one of the guards that had looked after Leia when she was younger. The guard named Dakir ended up confessing to all of his crimes amongst which had been the abuse of the young princess, and being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the harshest punishment available on the pacifistic world of Alderaan.

While Leia slept, Bail consulted a well renown psychiatrist, hoping that she would know a way to help his young daughter, to bring her back to the precious girl she had once been before everything had happened. The reason Leia had been willing to call a virtual stranger father was that he had failed to protect his daughter as he should have, and the man who had taken her from him had provided her with a family and the promise of the protection that he had failed to provide. The boy she traveled with and called brother couldn't possibly be Luke. Master Kenobi had assured him that the boy was too well hidden, and the odds of someone finding him were astronomical to say the least.

"Trauma this great has no doubt permanently scarred her. She will need a great deal of therapy to get over whatever brainwashing the bounty hunter did to her if ever, as well as the trauma of the abuse she has suffered. Personally, I think it would be best for her to get a new start with a clean slate as it were." Dr Childri said in answer to Bail's questions about what should be done for his daughter. The poor girl didn't need to remember the undoubtedly horrible life she lived as a hostage of some opportunistic bounty hunter.

"Will it hurt her?" Bail asked concerned for Leia's well-being. Leia's well-being trumped all other concerns in this matter. It was long since time he did right by his daughter. If the procedure could harm her, he would find another way, any other way.

"If it is done properly, the procedure will be completely painless." Dr. Childiri responded. "I have no doubt that it will be, because I know a number of experts in the field."

Three days later Princess Leia awoke with no memories beyond going into the woods to get her ball when she was six, and some memories from before then gone as well.

"Daddy, why am I so big?" Leia asked, her wide eyes taking in her "new appearance" as she studied herself in a mirror.

"You got sick and went to sleep for a very long time." Bail said as he hugged his daughter close to him. He had his little Leia back, but at what price?

That night, as Leia went to sleep, she saw a boy with blondish hair and blue eyes as clearly as if he was standing right in front of her. Something told her he was important and that she should never ever forget him. She didn't know who he was, but she swore then and there to do whatever it took to find him. Maybe he knew where all of the time had gone away to while she was asleep.

&!&!&!&!&

Fett watched his son reach out in his sleep, trying to grasp something that wasn't there, probably with the Force. Now that Leia was gone, Luke was all he had left. He had been unable to live a normal life with Sintas, and after their marriage blew up he had left her and his daughter Ailyn whom he hadn't seen or talked to since she was a toddler. Hearing the boy's silent sobs as the object, or more likely sister he was reaching for continued to elude his grasp, he decided to do something he hadn't seriously considered doing in nearly seven years.

Upon entering the cockpit, he dialed a certain comm code and prayed the person on the other end wouldn't hang up the instant she saw him. After waiting half a minute, his call was finally answered.

"Sin, it's me." he said.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	8. Time Passes

"We'd better leave. It seems that the Alderaani Security Force has orders to shoot us on sight." Boba Fett said as he reached for the thruster controls. Based on the hostile movements of the ships out there, there was no way the Slave I would be allowed to land on Alderaan intact. It would seem that Bail Organa could hold quite the grudge if he got a mind to. He could hold a grudge himself, and he would never forgive Bail for stealing his daughter.

"But Alderaan doesn't have any weapons!" Luke exclaimed, looking slightly stunned as he watched three brand-new fresh off the Kuat Drive Yards assembly line patrol craft begin to pursue them, illustrating the falseness of that claim.

"They seem to have made a special exception for our case." he said as he started the calculations for the jump into hyperspace. He and Luke would have to find some other way to get his daughter back. They wouldn't be able to do so while in the Slave I or any other ships that were registered to his name, as the Alderaani security had apparently been ordered to shoot them down if they ever tried to land on the planet. He was somewhat surprised that they hadn't seriously tried to terminate them already.

"But my sister's down there. We can't leave her." Luke said as he reached for the ship's controls in order to turn the ship around and try one of the insane maneuvers that had earned his birth father Anakin Skywalker the moniker of "The Hero Without Fear", which only a Force user like Luke could pull off.

"We can't rescue her if we're dead." he said, even though the words tasted bitter in his mouth, as he batted Luke's hands away from the control console and made the jump to lightspeed. He knew how Luke felt. He would be the first to race into the open maw of Hell if it would get Leia back. Leia was family. Leia was his daughter. It hadn't been just Luke that she had been taken from by that asshole Bail who seemed to think he was entitled to things that weren't his.

He mourned the loss of Leia almost as strongly as Luke had. For the past six and a half years, the three of them had been a small family much as he and his father had been, and the Slave I had been their home. Much of what they had done had been dangerous, but he had carefully calculated the risks and kept the children out of harm's way as much as possible.

The children had kept him company during his exile from his home, and now one of them was gone. Getting her back would be difficult, and he didn't know exactly what he would get back when they did so, if the rumors of the mind-wipe were true. He wouldn't give up however, he would just have to plan more carefully. There was no point in getting Luke and himself killed if it didn't free Leia from the clutches of Bail and his Jedi allies.

&!&!&!&!&

Fett never exactly knew why he had called Sintas after Leia was taken, but the call had allowed him to re-connect with his ex-wife and the child he had left behind when he had been exiled from Concord Dawn. His relationship with Sintas would never be like it was, but he had finally realized how damned stupid he'd been when he'd completely cut his daughter out of his life. The child had been an innocent party in the mess her parents had gotten themselves into, and hadn't deserved what she had got as a result. He could have at least visited the girl once in a while rather than entirely cutting ties, as Sintas had moved away from Concord Dawn after he left.

Concord Dawn had been more his home than hers. It had been the home of his father's ancestors, and that had been why he had chosen it despite the tragedy that had occurred there in his father's time. After he and Sintas had married, he had tried to settle down into the life of a Journeyman Protector like his grandfather. That was not to be however. One of his superior officers had raped his wife, and he was exiled from the planet when he had killed the man for doing so.

Sintas had immediately been taken with Luke when she met him, mothering him every chance she got every time they visited which was somewhat strange considering the fact that Sin was just as tough a bounty hunter as he was. And, while Luke eventually warmed up to his adoptive sister, it was clear that he would never have the same affection for her as he had for Leia.

The years began to pass, and every attempt they made to rescue Leia had been foiled somehow, one try having been foiled by the very security officer who had helped them off the planet when he had first taken Leia. Over time, Luke grew up, grew older, grew colder, and grew far more dangerous, much as he had done after the death of his father. It was almost as if any joy the boy once had had been sucked out of him with his sister's departure, and been replaced by some sort of darkness.

Luke eventually started hunting on his own, with each new hunt being longer and far more dangerous than the one before it. There were times when Fett wondered if Luke would just decide to not come home one day, or if the boy would die in the middle of nowhere and he would never know his fate.

&!&!&!&

Time had passed for Leia as well, she grew up well loved by her father Bail, her aunts Tia, Rogue, and Celly, her cousins, and her best friend Winter who played with her just like she used to when they were children. Several times, the "People who had tried to take her when she was sick" attempted to kidnap her once more. Each time, they were foiled by planetary security, but always managed to escape. Each time they failed, Leia wondered why a part of her seemed disappointed that they had done so. Every night, as she fell asleep, she saw the same blonde haired boy she had seen on the night after she had woken up from her coma. Now however, instead of simply looking lost as he had in the beginning, he looked sad and angry.

Over the years, she came to secretly suspect that there was something wrong with the story of her illness and coma. There had been a number of things that didn't quite add up...

When she went to school, at her own insistence since she didn't want to be stuck in the palace all the time, she had been determined to catch up with her age-mates. But, she discovered that somewhere, a part of herself knew the answers to just about everything in the curriculum except for local history. She was also able to read at a level that was well above that of most of the rest of her classmates, despite the fact that she had only just recently learned how to read on her own when she had fallen ill. That, and her knowledge of current events throughout the galaxy was eerily accurate.

She also rather swiftly discovered that she had combat skills and mechanical skills that she had never been taught. She had discovered this one night when she had snuck out in order to escape from Aunt Rogue who had been using her as a living dress-up doll for most of the week prior. She had somehow managed to disable the security alarms around the palace, and had almost effortlessly dropped one of the patrolling guards on her way out to a swoop bike race that she'd heard about but never reached because she'd stood there stupidly after she had dropped the guard, stunned that she had been able to do so and had been escorted back by another guard who had come and found them.

Her father Bail came to her one evening and explained that the reason for these hitherto unexplained oddities was because she had some abilities with the Force, and that it had to be kept a secret, because the Empire hunted down and killed what Force sensitives that the Emperor didn't enslave. His answer, though it pretty much explained everything, didn't entirely still a small suspicious corner of her mind which grew little by little over the years.

When she was seventeen, her father Bail took her to Coruscant so she could learn her future place in the Imperial Senate, a place that she had wondered that she would be able to competently take considering the six year gap in her life. This position would be the necessary cover for her activities in the Rebellion however, so it would be given to her when she took up her father's mantle there as well. As the planet and her fate drew near, the part of her that wanted to be drifting amongst the stars doing something else began to resurface from where she had forcefully pushed it back to. She did her best push it back once more. It was her job to help those less fortunate than she, but in order to do so, she would have to work to bring down the Empire. She couldn't do that if she was out wandering the stars doing kriff and all.

Bail, who had been carefully watching his daughter now that they were away from the safety of their homeworld noticed her uneasiness, and briefly wondered if he had brought her to Coruscant too soon. It was too late for such worries though. He had brought her, and made a number of arrangements that couldn't be canceled. What was done was done. It was about time that Leia learned what her future responsibilities would be. It was past when she would have started learning if Fett hadn't taken his child. Fett whom he hadn't seriously attempted killing on the off chance that the boy who constantly traveled with him was really Luke. Kenobi had been somewhat cagey the last time he'd asked about the boy.

"Leia, you're almost an adult, and it's time that you learn what your responsibilities will be when you're grown up." Bail said once again, placing a hand on his daughter's shoulder. He had been telling both her and himself this since the day he had made the decision to have her replace him as Senator of Alderaan.

Soon, the ship landed, they disembarked, and a speeder arrived and brought them from the space-port to the Alderaani Consulate.

The Alderaani consulate on Coruscant was a place that Leia vaguely remembered from early in a childhood that had six years stolen from it by a coma. She once again vowed to get her revenge against the person who had stolen that time from her as the speeder made its way to its destination. When they reached the building itself, she pushed back the part of herself that automatically began analyzing all of the entries, exits, and potential weak points in security. This would be her new home for an indefinite period of time, it wasn't a place that she would need to escape from.

Over the next year and change, Leia studied to become a senator, and leader of the Rebellion as her father wanted her to be.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	9. Luke and Han on the way to Alderaan

Luke studied his red Mandalorian armor. His sister should've been sitting next to him wearing a similar set in whatever color she decided suited her character. If the bastards who had taken his sister hadn't mind-wiped her, she would've returned to him years ago. They would pay.

Several times, he and dad had tried to rescue her, and several times they had ended up empty-handed, barely escaping with their lives. Now all there was to do was to wait long enough for the security officers to become slow and complacent once more, then try again. One day, he would have his sister back at his side where she belonged. Family belonged together.

Luke tuned out the whining coming from the cargo hold. He didn't care what the merchandise was saying (something about triple), only about the credits he'd receive when he delivered it to Jabba. This had been an extremely easy hunt, and he would have to find something more challenging soon.

After delivering the merchandise to Jabba and receiving his payment, Luke decided to follow an odd thought that he suddenly had. The thoughts that felt like this one had payed off more often than not in the past, most likely because they came from the Force.

Carefully stowing his ship in a cave that he knew wouldn't be disturbed, Luke removed his armor and stashed it in a storage compartment. He carefully reset his security system to repel anything other than him that came too close, pulled his old Swoop bike out of the cargo hold, and flew to Mos Eisley. Upon reaching Mos Eisley, he walked into the first cantina he saw and sat down at the bar. At a table across the cantina from the bar, he saw a very familiar old man in Jedi robes with a lightsaber on his belt negotiating passage with a small time smuggler with a chump change bounty on his head. After the old man left, Luke moved swiftly to the spot that he had vacated.

"So, how much to have me added to your passenger manifest?" Luke asked the brown haired smuggler before he could get up to leave.

"Ten thousand, all in advance." The smuggler whose name was Solo said.

"For that amount, you'd better be waiting on me hand and foot. Tell you what, I'll go discount and pay you three." Luke said grinning at the smuggler.

"Six, and you show me the color of your money right now, or stop wasting my time." Solo said looking irritated.

"Since you are going to Alderaan anyways, I think it would be a total waste to pay any more than four." Luke said as he pulled the credits from his pocket and showed them to the smuggler. "Four thousand extra for a trip is four thousand more than nothing extra."

"Who said anything about Alderaan?" Solo said suddenly becoming defensive.

"The old man did earlier to someone else, and since I won big today I decided to explore the galaxy starting with Alderaan. I hear that it's a very nice place, very green." Luke said as he drew the credits back toward his pocket.

Han watched the disappearing credits and sighed. He would need those credits to pay off Jabba. He hoped that he wasn't getting into something he would regret later. The kid didn't look like an Imperial, so there shouldn't be any complaints from the old man.

"Fine," Solo said holding his hand out "Four it is. Be at docking bay 93 in an hour and don't be late."

Once Luke left the table, Chewbacca growled something to Han.

"Look Chewie, we need the credits, and as long as our passengers don't try to kill us or each other I don't care what they're up to." Han told his longtime companion. "Just get the ship ready, and be on the lookout for trouble."

Chewbacca growled something back at his friend before he left the cantina.

"I know that I'm being extremely stupid, but we really need the credits." Han muttered at his friend's retreating back.

&!&!&!&!&

Leia sat in her detention cell staring at the ceiling and wondering why a fragment of a bedtime story of some sort that had to do with the Jedi Anakin Skywalker ran through her head every time she saw Lord Vader. The strange thing about it was that she could've sworn that none of her family nor any of her friends had told it to her.

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Vader once more entered the cell she was being held captive in to question her. Her lips moved as her mind once more recited the same two lines it had several times over since her capture, the two lines that she was somehow associating with Vader.

"Before you were born, the Clone Wars ended with the Jedi being declared traitors and the Jedi being exterminated. It was at that time that Anakin went missing and was presumably killed."

Vader paused. What was the princess whispering about? What did the Jedi purges and the "disappearance" of his former self have to do with anything? It had nothing to do with the plans to the Death Star or the location of the hidden Rebel base, so it was unimportant for now. But later, he would find out just exactly what the princess was talking about. Shoving the extraneous thoughts aside, he brought in the mind probe to begin the interrogation.

Leia was in pain, the probe was torturing her and she couldn't stop it. She cried out in misery because she knew that she was going to break. She broke, breaking straight through a barrier into a part of her mind that she had unconsciously shoved back time and again, fearing what it contained. A part that had preserved itself for a long time despite a medical professional's best attempts to destroy it. She found exactly where the six years that had been taken from her had gone. Image after image sped past her, and she wrapped them around herself like a shield. She remembered one of the first lessons in bounty hunting that her dad, Boba Fett, had given her:

"You make people pay you for information, it is not to be given away freely."

If Vader wanted the information she had, he would have to pay dearly, and probably not in the way he expected the "Princess of Alderaan" to make him pay. The plans to the Death Star alone had to be worth at least half a million. She would have to somehow get herself into a position where she could negotiate. Until then, she would have to endure this interrogation.

&!&!&!&!&

Several hours later, Vader went to give his report to Tarkin wondering at the strange change that had come over his prisoner. At one point early in the interrogation, it appeared that she would break and spill everything, and then he suddenly hit a hard core of determination and something else. By the time the interrogation ended, the naive and idealistic young princess had vanished and something else entirely had taken her place.

"So, any luck?" Tarkin asked as soon as Vader entered the Death Star's conference room.

"Her resistance to the mind-probe was remarkable." Vader said leaving out his pondering on the changes he had witnessed in the princess, hoping that he hadn't broken her mind and driven her insane somehow. It was really hard to get information out of a crazy person.

"Then perhaps we should use an alternative form of persuasion." Tarkin said, barely hiding his grin of anticipation. He had always hated Alderaan. He was highly allergic to some of the more common plants, and every visit he had been forced to endure had been torture.

&!&!&!&!&

As the Millenium Falcon blasted out of the Mos Eisley spaceport and into the reaches of outer space, Luke Fett sized up his traveling companions. The wookiee would probably be trouble later on, as it was looking at him funny. The smuggler, if it came to it, would most likely be dead before he even drew his blaster. The Jedi Kenobi would be tough. It was said that the Jedi got more powerful the older they got, and he had only barely escaped the man that one time he'd captured him years ago. The droids were inconsequential.

"Your days are numbered, old man." Luke said to the Jedi, scowling as he said it. Such cheap intimidation tactics had always amused him, and he often used them on his targets just for the entertainment value. The bounty for bringing in a living Jedi, especially this one was enormous. As soon as they touched down on Alderaan, he would try to make the capture. Fighting on the ship would be both pointless and dangerous. He wasn't in the mood to find himself in space without a suit thanks to an old Jedi cutting through the hull with a lightsaber any time soon.

"I don't want any trouble on my ship. You can fight or whatever when we reach Alderaan and I've gotten paid." Solo said, not bothering to turn around and look at his passengers. They hadn't been in hyperspace for more than a minute, and the problems were starting already. He should've taken Chewie's advice and tossed the credits back at the kid.

"That's okay, I can wait. There are some people on Alderaan that have it coming to them as well." Luke said smirking slightly at the thought of what he would do to Bail Organa if he ever caught him alone.

"Good. Now that we understand each other, get the hell out of my cockpit." Solo said gesturing sharply towards the door.

As soon as they left, Chewbacca began to growl nervously.

"You're right old pal, we should've left this one alone." Han said patting the highest spot on Chewbacca that he could reach. "I think I'll go out and make sure that the passengers don't destroy the ship."

&!&!&!&!&

Leia looked at Alderaan knowing exactly what was going to happen. Tarkin hated Bail Organa with a vengeance, and would happily blow Alderaan to space dust no matter what she said. There was no way she could save the people of Alderaan.

In that moment, she decided that she would never give the plans to the Death Star over to the Imperials, or the location of the Rebel base. She would leave them alive to sabotage this technological menace that never should've been built. Killing those who deserved it was one thing, but the pointless slaughter of innocents was something that could not be tolerated. Both Bail and dad had separately taught her that long ago.

The whole farce went pretty much as expected. She kept her silence even as the planet was destroyed and the shockwaves of the destruction had rippled out through the Force, reaching her seconds later. There was nothing she could've done to stop this. She remained silent as Lord Vader led her back to her cell.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke felt the disturbance in the Force at the same time as Kenobi did.

"Osik! That's worse than the time when Hilli got flattened." Luke said remembering the time he had been in-system when the imperials had decided to bombard Hilli city from space.

The old Jedi merely sat down with a saddened expression on his face.

"What's wrong?" Solo asked wondering what new problem would crop up on the trip from the sixth Corellian hell.

"It was as if..." the old Jedi began.

"Some place got blasted to hell!" Luke exclaimed, cutting him off.

"And, how would you know this?" Han asked wondering what had possessed him to pick up the pair of nutcases. The credits weren't worth this.

"The Force." Both Luke and the old Jedi said at the same time.

"What do you know of the Force, young Skywalker?" the old Jedi asked the boy, now young man, that he hadn't seen in years, ever since he'd made the mistake of attempting to remove him from Fett's custody. He had correctly feared that the man would poison the boy against the Jedi order, and had incorrectly feared that the man would hand Luke over to Vader were the price right.

"It could be a pretty useful tool at times, but depending on it is just plain lazy. Trillions of people do well without it." Luke said, not bothering to correct the old man on his name since it would cause unnecessary trouble with the smuggler.

"I had wondered why I had brought this with me, now I know." the old Jedi said as he pulled a cylindrical object from his satchel. "This once belonged to your father."

Luke took the lightsaber and studied it intensely. The old man spoke the truth, he could feel it. He held the symbol of his biological father's bondage to an order that had made a boy make vows that he didn't understand. It had been used in "The defense of the galaxy", and used when he turned against his masters in a desperate attempt to save the woman he loved. It had been stolen from him by a man who had been like a father to him, just like everything else in his life.

He looked up at the man who had handed the lightsaber to him.

"I had thought that you were only responsible for my and Leia's kidnapping, but now I know otherwise. I will wait until my sister is by my side before I get even with you, _Master_ Kenobi." He said as he activated his biological father's lightsaber and held it against the old man's neck. He then deactivated it and walked away.

"What was that all about?" Solo asked as he followed Luke who was now armed and doubly dangerous.

"I once went back to the place where I was born. I checked the records for that day, and noticed something. According to the medical droid's memory log, the incision that the droid had made had been perfect for a C-section. However, the images of the wound that I found on the security holos didn't match up with the droid's records. I checked the droid's records and found no signs of tampering." Luke said turning his biological father's lightsaber around and around. "I had thought that someone could have tampered with the droid's memory, but considering what Kenobi did to my birth father..."

"What does that have to do with what happened back there?" Solo asked. The kid seemed to be about ten nerfs short of a herd.

"The Force can easily be used to tear a wound open. I've done it on a couple of occasions. And from what I'd seen in the holo, that's exactly what happened." Luke said twirling the lightsaber in the opposite direction getting a flash of Kenobi dismissing his biological father's vision of his grandmother as a nightmare. "Kenobi was there when we were born. He was less than three feet away from my mother the entire time. He knew that she would never give her babies away. He knew that she would never allow them to be separated."

"You don't mean..." Solo began unable to finish the thought.

"Jedi aren't as moral as people believed them to be. They would often do what's "necessary" when it suits their purposes." Luke said tossing the lightsaber from hand to hand.

Han stood there wondering why the boy was acting so calm. Damn, if he found some guy who had killed his mother, he would've already torn his throat out and would be stomping on the remains.

"I want my sister to be there so she can get a shot as well." Luke said, answering Solo's unasked question.

&!&!&!&!&

Obi-wan sat listening to the conversation between the boy and the smuggler. The old saying "You reap what you sow." came to mind. He had indeed killed Padme in a way that would be blamed on the medical droids. If she had been allowed to keep the babies, they'd have almost immediately ended up in the hands of the Emperor, turned over by their own father. He had done what he had to do for both the good of the children, and the good of the galaxy as a whole. Now, the children were coming back to avenge their mother, and he deserved everything they could dish out.

Solo came back from the cockpit to inform him that they were coming up on Alderaan. The look in the man's eyes was odd. It was almost as if he half believed what Luke had told him, but didn't want to. A childhood hero-worship of the Jedi conflicted with the information he had been given. Information that happened to be true in this case.

He looked away and said nothing while they approached the cockpit.

When they got out of hyperspace, it was only to find asteroids where the lush and green planet of Alderaan had once been. Soon after this, they were captured in the tractor beam that was emitted by the space station that had destroyed the beautiful and peaceful world that had housed a number of his friends.

&!&!&!&!&

Vader listened to the report on the captured vessel. It seemed that the enigma that was Princess Leia would be of some use after all. Now to persuade the idiot Grand Moff Tarkin to spare her for as long as it took to determine exactly what use she would be.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	10. Death Star Adventures

Darth Vader stared up at the ship in the docking bay. On the outside it looked like a total piece of shit that was only held together by the Force and duct tape, and he wasn't too certain about the duct tape. But, based on the report from when it blasted away from Tatooine, the modified YT-1300 had some sweet engines. Studying it with the Force, he felt something strange. His former master was here, and with Kenobi was someone who seemed vaguely familiar, someone who was neither light nor dark, but was very strong in the Force. Most likely Kenobi's apprentice.

He decided that he would leave this until he decided exactly what sort of trap he was going to set. He knew from experience that his former master would come to him if he gave him time. He'd run into his former master a few times before over the years. It seemed that whenever they were on the same planet or in the same system for that matter, Kenobi could never stay away from him. They had clashed spectacularly on multiple occasions, and always, Kenobi would manage to escape and re-group. There had been rumors that Kenobi was dead when he vanished for over two years, but they had clearly been exaggerated.

As for Kenobi's new Padawan, he would deal with him later. Kenobi was his first priority.

He turned and left, taking most of the stormtroopers with him. Soon, Kenobi would be dead, and Leia would lead the Empire straight to her precious little Rebellion. If the princess hadn't been driven insane by his interrogation as he was beginning to suspect she had that was. If that was the case, who knew what would happen.

&!&!&!&!&

The passengers and crew of the Millenium Falcon waited for the last footsteps of the initial scanning crew to fade away before they exited the smuggling compartments. The compartments were extremely uncomfortable, and stiflingly hot, and being stuck in one with a slightly damp wookiee wasn't anyone's idea of fun, especially not Luke's.

"I never thought I would be smuggling myself in one of these." Han said, moving aside to let Kenobi out of the compartment he and the Jedi had shared because he was afraid of what the kid who he should never have brought aboard would do to the old man if they were stuck in a confined space together for any amount of time. The ship seemed too small for the both of them as it was.

"Nice idea old man, that's just one more thing I'm going to kill you for." the kid whose middle name had to be trouble said as he straightened out his hair and clothes, carefully brushing all of the Wookie fur off. "That walking carpet smells like ass."

"I got us in didn't I? If we hadn't gone with my idea, we would've been captured." Kenobi calmly pointed out.

"Here comes the second scanning crew, and our disguises." the kid said as he looked down the ramp. "Leave the blaster, I'll handle this."

When the scanning crew came aboard, there was a sudden snapping noise and both members fell to the ground, with the equipment they were carrying landing between them with a loud thud. Han stared in confusion, and was about to ask the kid something when the kid gestured for him to be quiet, then gestured for him to do his part as they had planned beforehand. He still wasn't certain about the plan the kid and the Jedi had cooked up. But, despite the long odds and the sheer insanity of it, it had worked so far.

"Hey down there, could you give us a hand with this?" he called down to the pair of stormtroopers at the bottom of the ramp who were guarding the ship. They complied with his request, moved away from their guard posts at the end of the ramp, and came up into the ship, out of the view of anyone else, and more importantly, out of the view of the docking bay security monitors. They too dropped to the ground after a sudden snapping sound.

"What did you do?" he asked the kid, looking down at four people who seemed to have simply dropped dead on their own accord.

"Snapped their necks. It's a lot more humane than what the Empire would've done to them if they found them alive." the kid replied casually as he walked over to the nearest stormtrooper, frowning slightly. "This armor is too large for me."

"Well, it's the best we've got, so stop complaining and put it on kid." he said as he walked over to the other stormtrooper.

He heard a sharp intake of breath next to him. He turned and saw the kid holding the stormtrooper's helmet, looking rather sick. He briefly wondered if despite the kid's tough guy act it had been the kid's first time killing someone, and that what the kid had done had finally caught up with him. He hoped the boy didn't barf on his ship. He had gotten rather sick himself the first time he killed someone. Deciding that it wasn't really his job to comfort the brat, he grabbed the helmet off of the stormtrooper in front of him. When he did, the kid looked, if possible, even worse.

"What's wrong kid?" Han asked, wondering why the kid was was so concerned over a pair of Stormtroopers. They were just a couple of clones rather than recruits after all, and there we millions of them where the two in front of him came from.

"I thought that the Empire had quit using that template and started using something else." Luke said, trying to regain his composure. It had almost been as if he had seen his dad lying there dead, except for a difference in scars, both men were virtually identical in appearance to his father. After he got control of himself, he quickly stripped the corpse in front of him, trying his hardest not to look at it. As he did so, he wondered exactly how much of Jango Fett's DNA the Empire still had. He was pretty sure his father knew about the fact that there were a number of his father's clones extant in the galaxy. How had he been able to handle it, considering the fact that he'd had to kill some Stormtroopers during a couple of hunts?

"Template?" Solo asked.

"The stormtroopers, as you can obviously tell, are Clones. These two are of the same template used during the Clone Wars. The guy who raised me was a son of the original." Luke said, wondering why he shared that fact, and realizing he wasn't anywhere near over what he had just done. Those two deaths he had caused hit him harder than all of the others, except maybe for his first kill.

Han looked down. Come to think of it, the Storm troopers looked rather familiar. He had some vague childhood memories of seeing people who looked just like them on the holo. He couldn't imagine what the kid was going through, seeing as the men probably looked alot like his grandpa when he was younger.

"I'd better inform you that if we stand too close together or near any other stormtroopers, our cover will be blown worse than a job done by a two credit hooker." the kid said as he put the armor on. "Our cover will most likely be blown anyways considering the fact that I don't come anywhere near meeting the minimum height requirement for recruitment into the Stormtrooper corps, but this appears to be the best plan we have for now."

As they prepared to leave, the kid turned around and said, "Chewbacca stay with the ship."

Chewie strongly objected to the kid's order and decided to show his displeasure at being ordered around by some small fry troublemaker. Rather surprisingly, the kid was completely unfazed by Chewie's expletive laden rant.

"Well, if you want to increase the chances of your friend getting killed, be my guest. Otherwise, stay with the ship." the kid said looking up at Chewie with an expression that said that he didn't care either way. "A Wookie wandering about where it clearly doesn't belong is going to raise more than a few eyebrows. If too many suspicions get raised, they won't just be shooting at you, but also at me and Solo as well."

Chewie growled what he thought about leaving his friend behind, but turned back to the cockpit, seeing the logic in the kid's argument.

Getting into the control room above the docking bay had been surprisingly easy, almost too easy. Han pretended to have a comm malfunction, luring one of the crew into leaving his station and opening the door, and the kid took care of the rest. After the room was as secured as it was going to be considering the fact that they were in enemy territory on an enemy battlestation which had at least half a million crew, he, the kid, Kenobi, and the annoying protocol droid sat around waiting while the R2 unit sliced into the Death Star's computer mainframe. Eventually, the R2 unit gave Kenobi the coordinates of the power station for the tractor beam controls, and the old Jedi left to shut them down.

Suddenly, the R2 unit who had continued slicing through the Death Star's computer in search of anything else that might be useful started beeping and whistling frantically. He hadn't seen a droid get that excited in...ever.

"What's he going on about?" Luke asked hoping that security hadn't been alerted to their presence. That would be bad. Very bad. On a scale of Everything's Fine to We're Screwed, it would be a We're Majorly Fucked since there would be absolutely no chance of escape.

"He keeps saying that he's found her, and that she's here." the protocol droid replied.

"Who has he found?" Han asked wondering what more would go wrong on this trip. The next time someone offered him credits for a ride somewhere, he was going to laugh in their face and tell them exactly where they could stuff their money.

"Why, Princess Leia." the droid replied wondering at the odd expression that crossed the human Luke's face when he mentioned the princess's name.

Luke swiftly walked over to a manual console tapped in some codes he'd learned from his dad, fiddled with the keyboard for several minutes in what seemed to be a random manner since what came up on the monitor appeared to be gibberish, encoded a data chip when he seemed satisfied with what he'd done, and set it in a datapad that was nearby.

"Solo, I'll pay you thirty thousand credits to bring this to the detention level where Leia is being held." Luke said, handing Han the datapad, since Solo was about the right height to pass for a Stormtrooper - recruited rather than cloned - and being former Imperial Navy could pass himself off as an Imperial much better than he could.

"I want them all in advance." Han said handing the datapad back knowing that the kid wouldn't be able to provide. The four thousand had most likely already tapped him out. He wasn't going to risk his neck any further than he already had during this disaster. It was a miracle that he, Chewie, Kenobi, and the kid weren't dead already.

"Fine. If you try to cheat me or get yourself and/or Leia caught, I will personally skin you alive." Luke said handing the datapad back to Han. "I'll give you an extra thousand if you send a message to your partner telling him to cause a bit of a distraction at a pre-approved time."

"So, where are you going to get the credits, huh? Are they going to mysteriously appear out of thin air, or are you going to pull them out of you-" Han asked as the kid reached into his armor and pulled a pouch containing about forty thousand credits from a place that he didn't want to think about. He did wonder why the Alderaani princess was so important to the kid that he was willing to pay so much for her rescue, and to pay for it all in advance.

The kid gave Han all of the necessary details of the plan he had in mind. Apparently, all he had to do was hand over a datapad and convince the recipients that it contained orders from the Grand Moff Tarkin who was also aboard the station. Ten minutes later it was time for him to leave.

"So, out of curiosity, why aren't you going to the detention center yourself kid?" Han asked as he headed towards the door.

"I'm too short, someone's bound to notice that." the kid replied, gesturing for him to hurry up and get out of there.

As soon as Solo left, Luke departed as well, headed to a rather remote spot that didn't appear to be covered by any security cameras one level above the docking bay that he'd spotted on his way up to the control room. From there, he could watch what was going on and correct the situation if necessary. The droids left as well, and hid on the other side of the docking bay from the ship, out of the sight of the monitors, in place and ready for when things finally went down.

&!&!&!&!&

Obi-wan Kenobi drifted through the corridors silent as a ghost, carefully hiding in each shadow he could find, doing his best to mask his presence. It wouldn't do to be caught by Vader who was also aboard the station now when he had a task to do. Vader was his greatest regret. If he had paid attention to the fact that the boy who had been like a son and a brother all in one to him was slipping rather than being so absorbed in his grief over Siri Tachi's death, none of this would have happened. The warning signs had all been there, and he had been too self-absorbed to notice them.

After silently drifting through the corridors for hours, avoiding every patrol he came across, he finally reached the reactor that powered the tractor beams for the station. He evaded and carefully hid himself from the last obstacle in his path, which was a pair stormtroopers who were audibly gossiping about some sort of new equipment or a speeder or something, and gossiping about the latest outrage that had been committed by their their dick of a commander on one one of their private comm channels.

After distracting the duo by using an elementary Force trick to make some noise off in the distance by picking something up and dropping it, he powered down the tractor beam. With his task completed, he began the trek back to the ship.

&!&!&!&!&

Han Solo stood nervously in the turbolift waiting to reach the detention level, or rather the detention level in which the princess from Alderaan was being held captive. If he did the simple little task he'd been paid for correctly he would have more than enough credits to pay Jabba with interest. If he didn't, he'd either die, or wish he were dead. He wouldn't focus on the price of failure now, with the solution to his current problems being so close, he would focus on the itty bitty task he'd been paid thirty thousand credits to carry out. All he had to do was hand a datapad to the guy who was in charge of the detention level, and get the hell out of there.

The lift doors finally opened, revealing the sector of the detention level in which his target was located. Being sure to move like a Stormtrooper rather than a hotshot pilot, he walked over to the watch commander thanking his lucky stars that he'd pulled that prank back at the Academy that had required him to successfully pass himself off as a Stormtrooper several years ago, otherwise this task would have been a great deal trickier to pull off.

"Sir, this just came in from Grand Moff Tarkin." Han said as he handed the datapad over to its intended recipient.

The Watch Commander studied the pad briefly and sighed.

"It seems that we are to bring the princess down to the captured Rebel ship in order to use her as bait to catch the intruders. I don't know exactly what it is those high ranking officers smoke during their breaks, but I have a feeling that things would go alot smoother if it were banned. That's the second order today that I received saying I should let the princess escape if someone came to rescue her. The last one was from Lord Vader." The man said shaking his head.

He turned to leave now that his task was done, and he was in fact thirty-thousand credits richer. Things had gone better than he had planned. As far as he was concerned, that whole letting the princess escape thing wouldn't be his problem. The instant he got the word that the tractor beam controls were offline, he and Chewie would be getting the hell out of here.

"You, help us escort her down." the Watch Commander said, freezing him in his tracks and infinitely complicating the situation.

Great. Just kriffing great.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke watched as his sister was escorted to Solo's ship. Everything was going according to plan. From the sound of things, it seemed that she'd picked up a few new expletives while she was away. In the part of the interior of the Falcon that was visible through the lowered ramp, one of the deckplates shifted slightly. Good, Chewbacca was in position, and Solo had come down with the group that was escorting the princess as he expected he would. Now, all that was left was the old bastard Kenobi that he and Leia would be killing at their first opportunity the instant he dealt with the brainwashing Organa had done on his sister.

Speak of the devil...Oh look, Kenobi's in a lightsaber fight with Darth Vader. He's dead, and Lord Vader had just unknowingly thwarted any chance he and Leia had of getting revenge on the old bastard. He decided that it was the best time to send the signal that the plan started now, as they were leaving without the now deceased Jedi.

He raised his blaster, and fired at the blast door control causing the doors to close, shutting Lord Vader and the reinforcements that were behind him out of the docking bay. At this signal, the guards surrounding Leia and the ship were to be killed, and everyone would start making their way aboard the Falcon in order to get the hell out of there.

Chewbacca popped out of one of the smuggling compartments before the blast doors were even closed, and started firing at everything in armor. He was surprised that Solo didn't get hit as he made his way to the Falcon. The instant Solo was aboard, he laid cover fire for Chewbacca using a hidden cannon that had popped out of the underside of the vessel. Leia ran up the ramp while Chewbacca continued firing at any and all of the imperials he could aim his blaster at. The droids were halfway across the docking bay and would reach the ship soon.

It was time. He jumped down the from the ledge he was on, using the Force to land lightly on his feet after the six meter drop. Putting on an extra burst of speed, he raced across the docking bay, and up the ramp of the ship. The instant the droids were aboard, the ramp was closed and the ship took off. When he reached the cockpit to see if Solo needed any help getting the ship into hyperspace, the man turned around and gave him a look that said that if he touched the controls there was a good chance that he'd lose some fingers.

"I was this close," Solo said holding the thumb and forefinger of his right hand about two millimeters apart. "This close to leaving you all behind."

"Thanks." he said, now understanding why his dad wanted to strangle Solo with his bare hands.

Leaving the cockpit, he made his way to the ship's small gaming and dining area. There, by the holochess set, sipping on a mug of tea that she'd somehow acquired was his sister Leia. The sister he had spent over six years without, and sometimes feared that he would never see again. The moment she saw him, her eyes went wide, and she ran towards him.

"Luke!" she yelled as she grabbed him into their first hug in over six years.

"Leia, how did you know who I was?" he asked, slightly puzzled. He had received confirmation of the rumored mind-wipe a couple years earlier, and knew that it was supposed to be permanent. He had planned on bringing her to any and every specialist he could the instant they were off Solo's ship.

"I got my memories back. I don't know how but, when Lord Vader was interrogating me, I broke through some sort of barrier and there they were." Leia said as she clung to him even more tightly.

He could tell that the memory of the interrogation pained her greatly, as well as the double betrayal by the man that she had called father for most of her life. Her pain and anguish radiated through the Force so intently that he himself felt it.

"I thought I lost you." he said, holding his sister close. "I'm never going to lose you again."

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	11. The Debut of Luke Skywalker

Luke and Leia were soon separated when the ship rocked upon being hit by a shot from a pursuing TIE Fighter. While getting away from the station had been relatively easy since they'd been pretty much let go, they couldn't get into hyperspace until they cleared the asteroid field that had been Alderaan the day before. Apparently, the escape wasn't going to be nearly as easy as they thought, since the Imperials apparently wanted to convince them that they'd escaped rather than been let go, hence the TIE fighters which were rather easily dealt with, clearing the way for them to finally enter Hyperspace.

"So, what do you think, five random hops and a pit stop on that Force forsaken planet Myrkr to pop the homing beacon?" Luke commed his sister who was in the cockpit with Solo from the gun turret.

"No, we take the information in the R2 unit directly to the Rebellion. They'll be more likely to pay more for whatever solution to the problem we come up with if the situation is urgent enough." Leia commed back, smirking slightly at the aforementioned droid. "Besides, I'd love to see the looks on the faces of "dearest daddy's" friends when their precious "Princess" Leia demands a quarter million credits for the plans."

"A quarter million? They're worth a half-million at the very least!" Luke exclaimed as he hopped out of the gun turret and made his way back to his sister, slightly surprised that Leia would give something over for less than half it's worth. The droid that carried the valuable plans began to beep and whistle in an extremely irritated tone.

"What's he on about now?" Luke asked wondering whether it would be important or not.

"Artoo says that he can hardly believe that the two of you are the children of the late Senator Amidala, and that if the genetic analysis hadn't proven it to be so, he wouldn't have." the R2 unit's protocol droid tag-along replied.

"Genetic analysis? When did it have time to- Nevermind." Luke said, remembering how the droid had gotten within two inches of both him and his sister several times within the enclosed space of the Millenium Falcon since they'd taken off, any one of those times could've been it. He decided to ask a different question. "Why was he so interested in who our mother was anyways?"

There was a loud beeping and whistling noise from R2-D2.

"My counterpart says that he used to belong to Mistress Padme, that he served alongside your father during the Clone Wars at her behest, and that whoever raised you did a very poor job of it." C-3PO responded, hoping that the expression on his new master Luke's face didn't mean that he had offended him.

"Well, if your "Mistress Padme" hadn't trusted those shabla Jedi and lived to raise me, then maybe dad wouldn't have had to." Luke practically snarled at the droid.

The R2 unit backed off whistling and beeping something as he did.

"Artoo would like to know who raised you to be as ill-tempered and as ill-mannered as you are." C-3PO said over R2-D2's whistled protests which needed no translation.

"Boba Fett's a great man, and if you insult him one more time, you'll be scrap. Death Star plans or no Death Star plans. Understand me?" Luke said whacking the R2 unit on its dome with the unlit lightsaber that he pulled from his sleeve. R2-D2 wheeled backward warbling.

"Artoo apologizes and requests that you don't turn him into scrap. I'll have to request that you don't turn me into scrap either." C-3PO said. There was further warbling from R2-D2 "As a peace offering he has decided to offer you every holographic record he has of your parents which he has stored in my backup memory...Backup memory? What backup memory? I don't have a backup memory."

There was a further warbling from R2-D2, as well as something that sounded like a raspberry being blown.

"What do you mean my primary memory was wiped and replaced by language files the day the twins were born?" C-3PO whined as the R2 unit continued to whistle and chirp.

"I don't know what you're talking about you malfunctioning junk heap, there's no way I was built by a nine year-old, that's preposterous. Admittedly, the Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker was reported to have been a brilliant and resourceful mechanic, but..." C-3PO continued as R2 warbled at him in a mocking manner.

Luke and Leia watched the droids argue for a while, wondering at the revelation that the droids had belonged to their parents. Leia was a bit more surprised than Luke at this, because Bail had kept the droids for a number of years, and had given them to Captain Antilles as a gift at one point. She had used the R2 unit to hide the plans to the Death Star, because it had been convenient at the time.

"So, if what the R2 unit is saying is true, and the droids did belong to our biological parents..." Luke began wondering if he even wanted the annoying droids. Well, they were some sort of a family heirloom after all. Maybe after some major reprogramming...

"That means they're ours, and we could do what we like with them and any information they happen to be carrying." Leia said getting to the practical reason for claiming ownership of the pair of droids. Some of the leaders of the Rebellion might try to stiff them by pointing out that the droids belonged to them, since Captain Antilles had left everything he owned to the Rebellion in his will.

"So, how will we divvy them up after we sell the plans?" Luke asked his sister who had seemingly decided to pretend that she had never left his side.

"Dibs on the protocol droid." Leia said running over to the aforementioned droid and grabbing its left arm.

"Damn."

&!&!&!&!&

After a long ride, during which Leia found C-3PO's backup memory, downloaded everything on it, and began "improving his personality", they had finally reached the Rebel base on the fourth moon of the planet Yavin. The ship hadn't been greeted with any great enthusiasm, until Leia went on the comm and demanded permission to land. They had been directed to one of the Massassi temples which littered the planet, that had apparently been converted to a modern military base.

"Princess Leia, I'm glad to see that you're alive." One of the leaders said as he approached the small group consisting of Han, Leia, Luke, Chewbacca, and the droids as soon as they disembarked from the Falcon. "Who are these people that are with you?"

"General Riekaan, this is Han Solo, captain of the Millenium Falcon, Chewbacca, his copilot, and my brother Luke, and the protocol droid C-3PO. This droid here, is a matter we need to discuss." Leia said smiling sweetly at the man who had been one of the now deceased Bail Organa's best friends as she gestured to each member of the group in turn ending with R2-D2.

General Riekaan turned to Luke. Leia's brother? He had known that Leia had been adopted at one time, so it was possible. However, if the General remembered correctly, during Leia's long captivity at the hands of the notorious bounty hunter Boba Fett, she had been held there by claims of a fictitious brother. The boy however, did bear a slight resemblance to the princess...

"I'm General Riekaan, what's your name son?" The general asked, introducing himself to this puzzle before him, deciding that the smuggler and the Wookiee were beneath his notice for now.

"I'm Luke Skywalker." Luke replied wondering what Force begotten impulse had pushed him into using the name of his biological father. Oh well, the name Fett probably wouldn't be welcome here, and it was always good to have another identity to fall back on.

General Riekaan stared at the young man in front of him. The more he looked, the more physical resemblances to Anakin Skywalker he saw. The smile he'd given him after introducing himself was similar to that of Anakin Skywalker's, and brought out the young man's boyish good looks. There was something hard and dangerous about the boy though, something cold and unforgiving. He saw it in the way the smile didn't quite reach the boy's icy blue eyes, eyes that looked very much like Knight Skywalker's had near the end of the Clone Wars.

The negotiations on the price for the information on the Death Star shocked all of those who "knew" Leia. Eventually a price was agreed on, and the information was taken to be analyzed. Luke hung around somehow knowing a much larger bounty was headed his way. Leia sat beside her brother comforted by the fact that he was there, and wouldn't be leaving her any time soon. She would have to face what happened to her eventually, but for now, she was content to pretend that she had never left her brother's side.

During the briefing of the mission to destroy the Death Star, Luke offered to destroy it for two million. The Rebel pilots who were going to do it for free were understandably shocked and outraged. One of them, a Tatooine native named Biggs stated that he was ashamed that he had even known him. Apparently, the Larses had visited the Biggs family farm quite often, long ago before Luke had "disappeared". A pilot named Wedge Antilles tried to sock Luke in the face only to find himself on the floor instead.

&!&!&!&!&

"So, let me get this straight. If I destroy the Death Star you will give me the two million, but only if I keep quiet about the payment and tell everyone at the meeting that what I said was a joke made in poor taste." Luke said to a woman named Mon Mothma, who had a bounty on her head that was about equal to an eighth of what his Death Star take would be, ten minutes after the eventful briefing.

"Yes, that's pretty much what I said. Are we agreed?" Mon Mothma replied wondering how someone who looked so much like a cross between Anakin "Hero Without Fear" Skywalker and Senator Amidala could be such a cold-hearted mercenary.

"Deal. I will provide the necessary information to transfer the funds to my account upon my return." Luke said as he finally realized exactly why he had given the name Skywalker to the Rebels. If the name Fett ended up in connection with the destruction of the Death Star, dad wouldn't just loose business from the Empire, he would be in a shitload of trouble for raising the person who destroyed it as well. The sort of trouble that got one publicly executed in front of the HNE news cameras. Anakin Skywalker was dead, and in no risk of coming to any further harm.

Shortly after Luke sent Leia and an extra payment off with Solo, just in case the base got destroyed before the Death Star did, he walked up to the X-wing fighter he was supposed to be piloting. He waved off offers of a new droid, as the R2 unit he'd arrived with had gotten his biological father out of a number of near-fatal scrapes during the Clone Wars. A newer droid might be less effective.

Wedge Antilles and Biggs Darklighter came to get him for the remark he made earlier, and he apologized, "embarrassed" over the "poor joke" he had made. Both of them wished him luck and left, Biggs telling Wedge that Luke was a good kid when they were little, and that he'd forgotten about his friend's twisted sense of humor in the years since they'd last seen each-other.

Soon, it was time to take off and battle the mammoth battlestation that was rather uncreatively called the Death Star. The X-wings and Y-wings which were the only craft the Rebellion had that could get through the station's energy shields which had been designed for protection from bombardment by larger ships reached the trench to the exhaust port that was their target, many being lost along the way. Luke covered Wedge as he made his run, knowing he would fail and wanting to see how badly, and exactly how difficult the shot was in the conditions they were under. Wedge failed as expected, and they broke off for another run, Luke now knowing what kind of shot he was going to have to make.

There was nothing for it. He would have to take the "lazy option" as dad called it. Without using the Force, the shot would be nearly impossible. Especially now that there was an added element. TIE fighters, three of them. He briefly wondered why there was only three, and then realized that there had probably been a disagreement in command between the station commander and some surprisingly intelligent officer who had seen the threat had most likely been sent out with a small escort in hopes of his getting killed.

He began his run with Biggs and Wedge following right behind him. The TIE fighters followed. The lead, a TIE Interceptor fired, taking out Biggs. Next, it fired again nearly taking him out, and severely damaging his R2 uint. The droid had been useful, and good at fixing things on the fly as he'd seen when something on the craft had come loose. He would have to get it repaired when this was over, if he survived that was.

He pushed that extraneous thought and all others aside a moment later. He would have to focus on the shot he was going to make, and ignore the feeling that someone had locked him on target. He wouldn't focus on the fact that in a moment he was about to die. He refused to. There was only the shot he needed to take.

Suddenly, out of the sunside of the system, came the Millenium Falcon. It targeted on and fired at the TIE fighter on the right. The TIE fighter slammed into the TIE Interceptor in the center sending it spinning away from the Death Star and into the reaches of space, out of control. It wouldn't be nearly as bad for the pilot as it would be if he were in a standard TIE. TIE Interceptors were equipped with hyperdrives, unlike their exceedingly cheap short-ranged counterparts.

"You're clear, now blow this thing so we can go home." came Han Solo's voice called out over Luke's comm.

He smiled. It appeared that he owed the smuggler one. If his sister had hijacked the ship, the smuggler wouldn't have been in any condition to talk. He turned back to his task moving his targeting computer out of his way and calming himself so he could focus on the shot he was going to make. He focused until everything stilled, his hand on the firing controls. He reached the point of no return. He fired. The shot was perfect, he felt it. He broke off, Wedge and the remaining X-wings following him.

They just barely escaped from the range of the blast with the Millenium Falcon beside them.

Upon landing on Yavin 4, Luke dodged the crowd of cheering people who all rushed up to hug him or pat him on the back. If they only knew. He ignored Leia's protocol droid's whining at the tech crew tending to his fighter, and walked over to the lowered ramp of the Millenium Falcon. His sister raced out and hugged him. Solo followed shortly behind, reached out to ruffle his hair, saw the look on his face, and swiftly changed his mind. Chewbacca, having no second thoughts about such things due to his size and strength, did so.

"So, what do you want, ten percent?" Luke asked Solo wondering exactly how much of his bounty would be going to the smuggler as his share for aiding in the destruction of the Death Star.

"Actually I don't want any money for that. I did it for reasons of my own. Long story. Besides, you paid me enough to pay Jabba back and live off of for a while, to help rescue and look after your sister." Han said, smiling at Luke. He would be joining the Rebellion after he went back to Tatooine and paid Jabba. He owed it to Bria, even though the woman had double crossed him and gotten him on a number of smugglers' shit lists. Besides, Chewie wanted to join the Rebellion, and would be miserable if they didn't.

"So, you're going back to Tatooine?" Luke asked, knowing what the answer would be.

"Yeah, why?" Han asked wondering what the kid in front of him was going to get him into this time.

"Well, I sort of need a lift there so I can go and get my ship. I'll pay extra." Luke said smiling at the look on Han's face.

&!&!&!&!&

After the medal ceremony honoring the "Heroes of the Rebellion" Luke received his payment for his actions in secret. He tried to hand the medal back to Mon Mothma only to have her return it to him stating that even though he was paid, he had saved the Rebellion from destruction. Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca and the droids set off for Tatooine in the middle of the night while people were too tired from their partying to question their departure too much.

"So, why did you give the Rebellion that bullshit name?" Han asked the kid the instant they were in hyperspace on course to Tatooine.

"Well, my dad's kinda a persona non grata with the Rebellion for some of the bounties he took, and the name wasn't entirely bullshit, it was my name before I got adopted." Luke responded, smiling slightly because he had some idea where the conversation was headed.

"So, what's your real name now?" Han asked his companion, curious about the trouble-making kid who had just gotten himself into really hot water with the Empire.

"Luke Fett." Luke replied, noting that Solo had pretty much the standard reaction to his name.

Solo had jerked back, his eyes wide with surprise, his mouth gaping like a landed fish. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times as if he was trying to find the right thing to say. Eventually he gained some semblance of composure.

"Damn kid, you know that if Fett hears you using his name like that he's going to kill you." Han said, having convinced himself that the kid had to be one of the biggest liars in the galaxy. Sure, he had some talent, blowing up the Death Star proved that. But, since he most likely had some nothing name that would leave most people scratching their heads and saying "Luke Who?" he'd apparently decided to use a name familiar to everyone in the galaxy and claim to be related. Why he was claiming to be related to the bounty hunter Boba Fett as well, he didn't know.

Luke just smiled and left the cockpit. Let Solo believe what he wanted to. The next time they ran into each other, he'd get one hell of a surprise. Leia sat waiting for him in front of the holochess board.

"I finally changed that protocol droid's personality into something more tolerable." Leia said smiling as she held up one of the tools she had used to work on C-3PO

"That's nice." Luke said noticing how R2-D2 sat near his longtime companion warbling mournfully "I don't think the R2 unit is happy about it though."

"He'll get used to it." Leia said with an odd look in her eyes. Suddenly she threw herself into Luke's arms and started crying. He had been waiting for this to happen. She would have had to stop pretending eventually. As she cried, he held her and comforted her until she was ready to talk about what she needed to.

&!&!&!&!&

At the end of the trip to Tatooine, much of which Luke spent talking to and comforting his sister, there was someone waiting in the docking bay when the Millenium Falcon landed.

Han descended the ramp first. He saw the armored man standing in front of the ship and knew that the confrontation to come would most likely be very bloody. Every time he'd run into Fett, there was some sort of trouble, and the bounty that was still on his head was somewhat lucrative. He sighed in relief when the man ignored him, continuing to stare at the ramp of the ship instead. The kid descended next, smiling the whole time. That poor kid, he was dead, and he just didn't know it. Fett never took to kindly to other people using his name.

"Hi dad." the kid called out grinning the entire time, while Han stared over at him with a look of pity on his face.

"Hello son." Boba Fett said as he embraced the boy who had some serious explaining to do, like what made him think he could blow up the Death Star in the first place, and why he was stupid enough to do so. Right now however, he was relieved that the boy was alive. Any discussions they had could come later.

He found himself watching in amusement as Solo fainted.

Chewbacca laughed. He'd suspected something along these lines since he'd caught the very faint, yet familiar scent on the boy in the Mos Eisley Cantina. It had been the reason he'd told Han to leave the kid behind.

**Edited on 3/13/2012**


	12. Dagobah and Hoth

The discussion between the male Fetts on the way to Keyorin had been quite heated. Fortunately, it seemed that everyone in both the Rebellion and the Empire had latched on to the fact that Luke Skywalker son of Anakin Skywalker had destroyed the Death Star and no further questions about Luke's background had been asked since people had heard Darklighter talk about how Luke was from Tatooine. The fact that Skywalker was also a Fett was known for a fact by only seven people throughout the galaxy, Luke himself, Leia, Boba Fett, Sintas Vel, Ailyn Vel, Commander Solo of the Rebellion, and his companion Chewbacca. None of them were talking.

Time passed as it always does and always will do. Eventually, Fett got over the extremely idiotic thing that his son had done, tempers had cooled, and they were back to being a family. Luke and Leia began to hunt together in matching red armor and, like when they were younger, neither was seen without the other. As they took on bigger and better bounties, their reputations as hunters began to rise, and they started becoming known throughout the galaxy as "The Fett twins".

The cold hard shell that had settled around Luke's heart in his sister's absence slowly dissipated and he became more open and affectionate, like he had been before Leia had been taken. People started to notice that the strange darkness that surrounded the male twin which had made the hair on the backs of their necks stand on end had abated and nearly vanished. This relieved Luke's father, because he hadn't wanted to see what would have happened if his son had given into it. The galaxy had seen enough Sith, and he didn't want to be forced to kill his own child when the darkness eventually drove him insane as it always did to the people who gave in to it.

When the twins weren't hunting, they were at home spending time with whoever was there at the moment, since everyone in the family including Ailyn who was just getting her start and usually paired up with Sintas was a bounty hunter. Most often it was Ailyn who was holding down the fort, though occasionally they would have a day with Sintas or their father. Ailyn had been delighted to have an older sister with whom she could talk about girl stuff such as boys, explosives, makeup, the latest weapons systems, boys, armor maintenance, and boys. On rare occasions, everyone would be there long enough to share a meal together as a family.

Occasionally, a Star Destroyer would be sabotaged or an Imperial munitions dump would explode, and much to Luke's chagrin it would be attributed to "the younger Jedi Skywalker". None of these had been his doing. He or rather "Luke Skywalker" had become a symbol to a Rebellion which seemed to be in need of heroes. The Skywalker name carried a weight with it that few did thanks to the actions of the highly visible Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars. Having that name associated with the Rebellion had boosted recruitment a great deal as those who remembered and practically worshiped Kenobi and Skywalker twenty years before flocked to their banner.

Luke and Leia occasionally did business with the Rebellion if it paid well enough. They didn't work with them often, and kept their helmets on when they did, since they didn't want anyone recognizing them and asking awkward questions.

For three years, life continued in this manner before they got dragged into the fight between the Rebellion and the Empire again. They had been on Hoth delivering some sniveling spy to the Rebels when Luke had the vision that had set events rolling. He had been napping in his bunk aboard the ship he and his sister shared when that old fart Kenobi showed up like a bad decicred. The glowing blue light that the now see through bastard emitted prevented Luke from rolling over and going back to sleep, especially since it was shining directly in his eyes, and covering his head with his pillow hadn't worked.

His first thought when he saw Kenobi was that he was having a hallucination of some sort. Kenobi informed him that it wasn't a hallucination, that he'd become part of the Force, and had been able to visit him through the Force. Apparently, Jedi could come back from the dead. It looked like he and his sister would get their revenge after all. Kenobi then proved that death had rotted his brains, as he started ordering him around

"Luke, you will go to the Dagobah system." The apparition said in a mysterious voice.

"Get the Kriff out of here old man and let me sleep." Luke said rolling over yet again and covering his head with his blanket, which also failed to get rid of Kenobi.

"You will go to the Dagobah system." Kenobi said once more in the mysterious voice he was using for some strange reason, probably because he thought it sounded impressive.

"Once again, get the kriff off my ship." Luke said burying his head underneath his pillow once more for all the good it did him.

"Fine." the apparition of Kenobi said slowly vanishing, muttering rude things about Luke, both his fathers, his adoptive grandfather, and the condition of the galaxy as a whole the entire time he did so.

Unable to get back to sleep thanks to the glowing Kenobi's parting gift of more energy than he would have had after several cups of caf, he wandered over to the main mess hall where his sister was chatting up the newly minted General Solo (Wanted By The Empire, Half Million Credit Reward). He would have to have a talk with her about her little crush later, especially considering the much more suitable marriage proposal she'd received from "Kad" Skirata who was closer to their own age. Father would go through the roof if Leia and Solo started dating, especially considering his and Solo's history. Solo had been one of the very few living beings who managed to both outsmart and evade Boba Fett.

"Leia, do you mind staying here for a while? I'm going to some place called Dagobah." Luke said to his sister.

"I don't mind, why?" Leia asked, wondering if their father needed any help since he had mentioned going there the last time she commed him.

"To trash whatever I find there." Luke replied. If Kenobi had taken the time to come back from the dead in order to get him to go there, there was a good bet that there would be something there that was worth destroying in order to spite the old man.

"Okaaaay. Have fun." Leia said as she hugged her brother. Apparently, dad didn't need their help, and she would be able to have more time with Solo who their father most definitely didn't approve of. She'd ask her brother exactly what he wanted to destroy in that Forceforsaken swamp when he got back.

"What was that about?" Han asked after Luke had left.

"I have absolutely no idea." Leia replied.

&!&!&!&!&

Aboard the Imperial Super Star Destroyer Executor, Darth Vader was attempting to alleviate his boredom by wondering once more why he had decided to serve that lunatic who called himself the Emperor, and why he continued to do so. The survival of his son had proven that Palpatine had lied to him about how Padme had died since she had lived long enough to give birth to the boy he was having a very hard time finding.

"Sir, one of our probe droids might have gotten something." Said the only competent officer above the rank of Sergeant aboard the ship, a Captain called Piett. He'd be getting a promotion soon if Ozzel continued being the total ass that he was. Speaking of Ozzel, there he goes talking about how he didn't want to chase some nothing lead to the ass end of space only to find a bunch of smugglers.

He walked over and looked at the image on the screen that the two officers were studying. The Force told him that what that droid had found was indeed the Rebel base.

"Set course for the Hoth System." he yelled over to the navigation team before wheeling around and heading to his quarters. Dealing with Ozzel for any amount of time gave him a headache. He hoped the moron would do something that would allow him to kill him without the Emperor complaining about him doing so very soon.

&!&!&!&!&

Meanwhile, back on Hoth:

General Han Solo stared at the remains of the Imperial probe droid that he had just inadvertently blasted to pieces. Well, actually the thing self-destructed, but the end result had been the same. Unfortunately, it had managed to get a signal out before flaming chunks of it decorated the surrounding snowbanks. The Empire would be here soon. They would have to start evacuating the base immediately.

&!&!&!&!&

Meanwhile, in space:

Luke prepared for his arrival on the planet Dagobah, snickering as he noticed the fact that his father was just leaving the system as he arrived. If there was anything down there that was left for him to destroy, it would not be there for very much longer.

&!&!&!&!&

Han watched his unexpected passenger as they blasted off from Hoth in the Falcon. He hadn't expected to bring Leia along, but she had been short a ship, there hadn't been time to get her a ride on one of the transports, and he wasn't about to leave her behind for the Imperials to capture. She was a nice enough girl except for that whole Mandalorian bounty hunter thing. Oddly enough, he could see himself with her in the future, as long as Fett didn't decide to hang around. He hadn't thought that way about a woman since Bria.

He was pulled out of his reverie when the golden protocol droid that Leia had brought along with her tapped him on the shoulder.

"Hey meatsack," C-3PO said once he got Han's attention "Your hyperdrive's broken."

"What!" he yelled. He'd been about to go into hyperspace in order escape from the pursuing Star Destroyers. In fact, he'd had his hand on the lever when the droid had interrupted him.

"Are you deaf or just stupid, I told you your hyperdrive is broken." C-3PO said.

Han muttered under his breath as he headed toward the nearby asteroid field in order to escape the Star Destroyers that were hot on his tail.

"I think the answer is stupid, and kriffing insane." C-3PO said as the first asteroids sailed past the ship.

"Shut that thing off before I blast it to pieces." General Solo said as he took one of his hands off the controls and moved it towards his blaster.

"Someone shoul-" C-3PO began before he was deactivated.

Under the expert guidance of Han Solo, the Millenium Falcon raced through the asteroid field evading asteroids and pursuing TIE fighters with seeming ease. Coming upon one of the larger asteroids, the Millenium Falcon gracefully looped back and dove into a large hole in its surface.

&!&!&!&!&!&

Aboard the Super Star Destroyer Executor, Darth Vader had watched the small Corellian freighter that he was going to add to his collection one day evade the fleet and head into the asteroid field. When he had reached his senses out toward the ship, he had felt a presence that was like his Padme, but not. Undoubtedly, his son Luke who had so far evaded his spies was aboard. He would do anything to have his son here by his side instead of out there and in danger.

Knowing that the small ship could wait in the asteroid field almost indefinitely, and that he and the other ships in the fleet would have to be called away on duty at some point in the near future since a large number of the rebels had managed to escape, he took one of the few avenues open to him at the moment. He called for bounty hunters.

As he waited for the bounty hunters to arrive, he took care of important ship's business and fielded a call from the Emperor in which he promised to have Luke join them. He was going to have Luke join him, but as long as the Emperor believed that he was his loyal servant, the Emperor pretty much stayed off his back.

&!&!&!&!&

Leia was busy helping Han fix the ship so they could get out of here before they ran out of food in two months. The hyperdrive was shot to hell and would need to be taken care of at a spaceport, but other repairs needed to be made. Some part that she had been working on was stuck. As she struggled with it, Han came and helped her move it back into place. She didn't quite remember the conversation they had next, but one moment they were working on unsticking a stubborn part of Han's rustbucket and the next, they were kissing.

In the middle of a rather spectacular kiss, Han felt a blaster poking him in the back, between his ribs. He quickly broke the kiss and whirled around to see who had threatened him.

"Hands off meatbag." C-3PO said, blaster in hand and aimed straight at Solo.

Leia smirked as she left the alcove and headed up to the cockpit. Trust her father to add defense programming to the droid and not tell her about it. She would have to find it and remove it soon, after all she can't have C-3PO constantly threatening her future husband every time he kissed her.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke and R2-D2 wandered around in the muck on Dagobah, searching for the strange presence that always seemed just a little farther ahead. The ship had crash landed in a muddy lake and Luke knew he would have a hard time getting it out later. Fortunately, it was all in one piece, and in relatively good condition.

After hours of wandering, he came upon a small hovel in a clearing. Sitting outside, was a small green creature with large pointy ears. R2 warbled a greeting at the creature.

"Haven't seen you since born, you were. Grown big, you have. Like your father, you look. Nice to see you again it is." the green creature said upon spotting Luke.

**Edited on 3/14/2012**


	13. Running Around Bespin

Leia still couldn't believe that Han had been dumb enough to land the Millenium Falcon in the stomach of a giant space worm. But then again, it was partially her fault since if she'd been paying more attention to their surroundings, she could've warned him before he did so. She hadn't been, and they barely escaped from the worm's gullet. Actually, they'd barely escaped being crushed between the worm's teeth.

She thought Han's latching the ship onto a Star Destroyer was pretty neat. It was one of the less common tricks in the book, and worked on just about everyone but her dad. As they waited to drift away when the Star Destroyer they were clinging to dumped its garbage, Han reviewed the limited number of places they could go without a hyperdrive. There were very few places they could go, but Han had connections on Bespin, which was one of the options.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett wondered why in the galaxy Darth Vader thought that Luke would be riding around with the smuggler turned Rebel general, Han Solo. The last he heard, Luke was headed to Dagobah to cause some chaos and destruction for some strange reason. He thought it had something to do with that little green troll of a Jedi master that he should've shot ages ago. Perhaps Luke had gone to do it for him.

While everyone else went on their little wild goose chases across the galaxy, he followed the Falcon as it drifted away from the departing Star Destroyers with the trash. He knew Leia was somewhere nearby, and he decided to call her to see if she wanted to help out with the hunt since he hadn't seen her in months. Sintas and Ailyn were on some sort of shopping spree on Coruscant for Ailyn's eighteenth birthday. He knew he would not bee happy to see his account balance when they got back.

When he finally reached his daughter, she sounded like she hadn't wanted to answer her commlink. When he heard the voice in the background he knew exactly why she'd been reluctant to answer. Apparently, she'd been hanging around the Rebel base in hopes of getting another bounty from them and somehow ended up needing to hitch a ride with Solo. He would have to find a way to get her away from the Imperials without them noticing when he led them to the smuggler turned General.

If Solo even looked at his little Leia the wrong way while she was aboard his ship, he would be floating around the galaxy in little pieces.

&!&!&!&!&

The Millenium Falcon landed at Cloud City on Bespin without further mishap. A dark skinned human male wearing a blue cape came out to greet them as they disembarked. After some posturing on his part, he happily greeted General Solo and attempted to introduce himself to Leia. Attempted being the key word. The droid got to him first.

"Hello, I am C-3PO Human Cyborg Relations. Please either state your business in five words or less or Fuck off. " C-3PO said as he raised a blaster to further drive his point home.

"Uh Han, this droid is..." Lando begain as he noticed that the blaster was charged and the safety was off.

"Threepio, stop that." Leia yelled at the reprogrammed protocol droid before apologizing to their host.

Lando turned and invited them inside where they all followed him on a tour that ended with them in the custody of Darth Vader.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett felt like tearing his hair out through his helmet. He'd failed to get his daughter to safety before the Imperials had captured the group she was with, and now, he would have to find a way to get her back without upsetting Vader. Leia's former status as "Princess of Alderann" and her involvement with the Rebellion while she had been under Organa's control wouldn't help in this regard. The best thing to do at the moment would be to go with the flow and take his shot when the opportunity showed itself.

&!&!&!&!&

Darth Vader was somewhat confused. Luke wasn't on the ship as he had believed him to be. He had captured a pair of rather prominent Rebels though, which could be considered something of a bonus. Luke Skywalker being what he was, wouldn't fail to come to their rescue. He would have to hold on to General Solo and Princess Leia until his son came to him. He decided that he didn't want to be in their company any longer than he had to, and turned away from the young woman who strangely resembled a combination of both the women he had loved most in his life, his mother and his beloved Padme.

He needed to go fix something. Fixing things had always helped him focus, helped him get a handle on things when his life started to spiral out of control. The golden droid that was in pieces in the box near Chewbacca would do. Using the Force to summon the box with the droid on his way out, he left the room that contained his captives.

&!&!&!&!&

The only reason Luke hadn't killed Yoda the moment he met him, was because the old Jedi had known his birth father. While R2 had many stories of when the droid and his father met, and of the Clone Wars, Yoda knew what had happened in between those times. Yoda knew that Luke hadn't wanted training, and chose to respect his wishes. Instead, Yoda told Luke of the father he never knew, the father he lost before he was born. Yoda told Luke everything he knew, even the most painful parts.

"Know that after a thousand generations, finally gone the Jedi order is. By our blindness, destroyed it was. Try to rebuild it, I will not." Yoda had told Luke on the first day.

Luke let his mind wander as he watched Yoda practice his Lightsaber technique. He wandered into the Force as he sometimes did, seeing flashes of the past, present, and possible futures. One vision jarred him violently, and it was because of that vision that he decided that it was time to leave.

"Leaving, are you?" Yoda said as he held out an object to Luke. "With you, take this. Learn what you want, you should, and leave the rest, you should."

Luke took the object from Yoda as he ran toward his ship. As the ship departed a blue ghost appeared next to Yoda.

"Why didn't you train him? That boy was our last hope." Obi-wan said.

"Hope for the Jedi order, there is not. Hope for the future, there still is." Yoda said as he headed back into his home and resumed his old job of sending Palpatine visions of the future he had wanted. Served him right for sending Anakin visions of Senator Amidala dying. Yoda regretted not being more helpful in that situation, but the past was gone. Spending time with Luke had been a pleasant interlude. As he had gotten to know the boy, Yoda began to understand why several Jedi had left to join the Mandalorians over the millenia.

&!&!&!&!&!&

Luke looked at the present that Yoda had given him before he left as his ship raced towards Bespin trying to figure out what it was besides some sort of data storage device. Suddenly, it activated.

"Greetings, I am Jedi Master Kmi Ivarros keeper of this Holocron. What is it you wish to learn?"

Luke considered destroying the object then and there, but remembered Yoda's words. Take what you want, leave the rest. He would learn to hone his abilities in the Force for his own reasons, but he would never become a Jedi.

&!&!&!&!&

As Darth Vader repaired the golden droid that he had taken from the Rebels, he came to realize exactly what it was. It was his C-3PO, the one that he had rebuilt for his mother, and had given to Padme. The bastards who had stolen it from his Padme had reprogrammed it, then destroyed it. He would return the droid to it's original programming later. First, he had business to take care of. He would have to be present for the testing of the carbon freezing chamber to make sure the method would work for Luke, after all, it wouldn't do to accidentally kill his son the moment he got him back.

&!&!&!&!&

Leia looked across the carbon freezing chamber at her dad. She had spent several years with him, and because of that, she could tell that he was troubled even though he was doing his best to not let his unease show, and his helmet hid any and all of his facial expressions. It was something about the set of his shoulders that gave him away.

The reason she was here was because the man she loved, the man she had decided to marry, was going to be used as a test subject to ensure that a trap that had been set for her brother wouldn't be fatal. Chewbacca had nearly gone into a berserker fury when what was about to happen was revealed, but Han had stopped him by requesting that he take care of her. She didn't need a seven foot tall fur covered bodyguard, but she appreciated the gesture.

Looking into Han's eyes, she knew that he returned her feelings. Right before he was to be frozen, she ran up to him and kissed him. In her peripheral vision, she saw her dad's finger inch toward the trigger of his blaster, a clear sign that he most definitely did not approve. Two Stormtroopers roughly pulled Han away, and put him into position for what was coming next.

"I love you." Leia called out to her intended as the process started.

"I know." Han replied.

&!&!&!&!&

"Wrong answer dirtbag." Fett said, aiming his blaster at the man who was being lowered into the pit. The man who had been a thorn in his side for longer than he cared to think about. The man who was really going to regret messing with his little girl.

Before he could pull the trigger however, Vader pulled the blaster up towards the ceiling.

"You can kill him later, we need him alive at the moment." Vader said.

A few moments later, a living Han Solo who was encased in carbonite was raised from the carbon freezing chamber.

Fett watched as the frozen Han Solo was loaded onto his ship less than an hour later. Death by blaster would be too good for the man. He'd have to find something suitably slow and humiliating. Until then, he could ask Jabba to store him as a favor. Since, despite the fact that Solo had paid him off, Solo wasn't one of Jabba's favorite people, he had a feeling that Jabba wouldn't have much of a problem with doing so.

He was about to find a way to rescue his daughter when she gave him a subtle signal that informed him that she'd be rescuing herself, and not to take any unnecessary risks. Trusting her abilities and judgement, he departed.

&!&!&!&!&

Leia frantically tried to figure out some way of causing a distraction and blowing her way out of Imperial custody that wouldn't end up getting her killed. She would team up with Chewbacca and take the Falcon out of here as soon as they were free, which she had yet to figure out how to manage. They and their Imperial escort rounded a corner and found Luke standing in front of them with an old DC-17. Without warning, he began mowing the stormtroopers down. An officer tried to drag Leia away, but she rewarded his efforts with an elbow to the genitals before knocking him out.

The team that Lando had assembled to help rescue Leia stood there and stared in awe as Leia picked up a weapon that had been dropped by one of the fallen Stormtroopers and joined Luke in the carnage. As Lando watched the scene he realized that they apparently wouldn't be needing his help in this situation. If he wanted to get them to let him hitch a ride off-planet, he would have to find another way.

"It's a trap" Leia said to Luke in a rather conversational tone as the last of the stormtroopers was taken care of. More would be arriving momentarily, and they needed to get out of there fast.

"I know it is. I figured I may as well spring it." Luke replied, glad that his sister was safe, and that the vision that had brought him here hadn't come to pass.

"Just as long as you're sure you know what you're doing." Leia said. "I'm off to swipe the Falcon. You know, the whole Plausible Deniability thing we agreed on."

"Ah, I'll go where my feelings are leading me, and spring the trap then." Luke replied. "See you around."

&!&!&!&!&

Vader sat restoring the programming on the newly repaired C-3PO as he waited for his son to arrive. This confrontation would be the beginning of everything, all he had to do was convince the boy to join him. Soon the Emperor would be dead, and the Galaxy at his and his precious Padme's son's feet as they ruled it side by side, making it a place that Padme would have been proud of.

Hearing a noise in the carbon freezing chamber, he halted his task and went to investigate. It was his son.

The fight that followed his failure to freeze the young man had been fierce. It took several minutes before he had been able to take the blaster from the boy. It was only after the blaster had been taken that the boy began to use his lightsaber. The lightsaber battle had been relatively intense though it soon became obvious that the boy was rather inexperienced with the weapon. He had been able to back the boy out a broken window and onto a narrow walkway over an abyss. He honestly hadn't meant to slice his son's hand off afterward, but he'd never faced an opponent that so inexperienced in a lightsaber duel, and he had expected the boy to block the blow. But slice the boy's hand off he did.

It was when the young Rebel was reeling and going into shock that he decided to tell him his most devastating secret.

"Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father did he?" he said.

"No." Luke replied already knowing where this conversation was headed thanks to Yoda.

"I am your father." Vader said waiting for the shock.

"I already knew that." Luke replied as casually as he could in the situation, considering the rather considerable amount of pain he was in.

"But you said that Obi-Wan never told you." Vader blurted out. This was not going the way he had planned. The plan had been to get the boy to his most vulnerable point, reveal that they were family, turn him to the Dark side, kill the Emperor together, and rule the galaxy with him as the master and his son as the apprentice. Right now, the boy was at his most vulnerable, but he didn't seem to be turning like he should. What had gone wrong?

"Yoda did. About five seconds before he died." Luke said. The little green troll was helping him out, so there was no benefit to bringing a Sith Lord down on his head. The lie had apparently gone unnoticed since Vader seemed satisfied with his explanation.

"You could destroy the Emperor, he has foreseen it. Join me, and we could rule the galaxy as father and son." Vader said as he continued on with the conversation he had planned out in an attempt to regain his footing. He was supposed to be doing this in a secure location after he unfroze the boy from carbonite. Nothing was going to plan.

"How much?" Luke asked. He needed to hurry this along quick, the half focused healing trance wasn't doing anything for him and he was really in need of medical attention. He had only been half paying attention to Vader as he was losing track of the situation and threatening to black out, but he'd heard something about killing the Emperor, which meant a bounty.

"Huh? How much what?" he asked completely thrown off.

"How much to kill the Emperor? I won't do it for anything less than ten million." Luke replied. He thought that the figure of half the galaxy was ludicrously high. Usually it was him who listed the ridiculous figure and the guy setting the bounty who tried to drive the price down. There was no point in owning half the galaxy anyways. Ruling half the galaxy wouldn't leave him any time for the necessary things in life like raising the children he planned to have once he found the right woman. He'd most likely be stuck in endless meetings every day and have to do a ton of paperwork.

"Twenty million." Vader said realizing that the boy was starting to drift off and was seriously in need of medical attention. The boy would likely resist him and further injure himself or even accidentally kill himself considering the position he was in if he tried to grab him right now. He'd give the boy whatever he wanted to make him more willing to join him if only so he could get him to the nearest doctor, and if he wanted money, that was fine.

"Deal. Pleasure doing business with you." Luke said "And since certain parties would be quite suspicious if I joined you due to the reputation I somehow seem to have gotten, I guess I have to do the whole plausible deniability thing."

Vader watched in shock as his son dove off the walkway and into the abyss below. As he retrieved C-3PO on his way back to his ship, he wondered why in the moment before his son jumped to what could've proven to be his death he had reminded him of a slightly deranged Boba Fett.

&!&!&!&!&

Leia had been somewhat surprised when she discovered that she had to pick Luke up off a weather vane at the bottom of Cloud City on her way out of the system. She was glad that she had slowed down to reactivate the hyperdrive before she jetted out of the system in Han's ship.

"What happened?" she asked when she noticed that her brother was missing a hand.

"The son of a bitch that impregnated our biological mother cut my kriffing hand off before hiring me to kill the Emperor." Luke replied before passing out.

Once Luke was properly stowed, she set course for the one place where he was sure to get free quality healthcare no questions asked, the Rebel Alliance rendezvous point.

&!&!&!&!&

Vader had been glad to discover that his son was alive and would probably continue to be so for a while yet. He was unhappy that his son wasn't at his side though. This brought his tally to neutral. The constant aggravation that was the protocol droid that he finally remembered why he foisted off on his wife tipped the balance to dark.

After putting up with two days of listening to a droid that could whine far worse than he used to when he was a Padawan, he shut the droid down. Glad he saved a copy of the program that had so changed his childhood project, he reprogrammed the droid once more, adding a couple of necessary extras as he did so.

"Where's my blaster meatbag?" the newly reprogrammed droid said by way of greeting upon being reactivated.

Watching his crew cower at the sight of his childhood friend and creation was going to be soooo wizard.

**Edited 3/14/2012**


	14. The Hunt For Han

Admiral Piett briefly wondered if there was something wrong with Lord Vader, and swiftly decided that he didn't want to know. Vader had been in the strangest mood ever since they had left Bespin, and now there was a blaster wielding protocol droid following him around like a lost puppy. It gave him the creeps every time he saw it. Deciding it would be best to concentrate on his work and leave his musings for later if ever, he turned to look over the Navigator's shoulder at the console before him.

As Piett pretended to be busy, Vader wondered what exactly was wrong with his droid. While its lack of volubility was a relief, it seemed, if one could ascribe emotions to a droid, to be somewhat unhappy. Finally, after making his routine visit to the bridge where the droid appeared to scare the crap out of people more than he did (probably something to do with its novelty), he returned to his quarters with C-3P0 in tow.

"What's wrong?" Vader asked the droid once they were inside the room that housed his hyperbaric chamber.

"It's not that I'm ungrateful to you for making me meatbag, it's just that I've got a job to do, and being here is keeping me from getting it done." C-3P0 replied.

"What job?" he asked. The droid shouldn't have any responsibilities other than the ones he had given it.

"Program amendment 5: Guard, and protect the virtue of Leia Amidala Skywalker Fett." C-3P0 replied.

"Who?" Vader yelled, wondering if he'd misheard the droid.

"Mistress Leia, one of my two primary charges. I have, since R2 restored my complete memory, been attempting to tend to Mistress Padme's children as she requested before their birth. Master Fett added amendment 5 to my programming so I could better carry out this task." C-3P0 replied somewhat nervously. It wouldn't do to upset a Sith Lord. Doing so most often resulted in permanent dismantlement.

Vader sat stunned. The unexplained presence on Solo's ship was now explained. How could he have been so blind? He had noticed that Leia had looked like a cross between Padme and his mother on more than one occasion, it couldn't have been that far a jump. He didn't just have a son, he had twins, a son and a daughter. He'd also proven to be the galaxy's worst father as well. He'd tortured one and cut the hand off the other.

What did Fett have to do with his daughter? Why did she have his last...Threepio had called him Master Fett, there was only one explanation for that. The reason Fett had nearly killed Solo for kissing Leia was now quite obvious, and for that reason, the son of a bitch was going to pay.

There was no way in hell that he would have Boba Fett for a son in law. 'Til death do you part would be coming far sooner than Fett expected if he had anything to say about it.

&!&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett stared at the bags and packages that blocked the entryway to his family's home. When Sintas said she was taking Ailyn shopping on Coruscant, he'd expected a couple expensive outfits and a few pieces of jewelery to be charged to his account, not half of what looked like every expensive boutique they could find. Ah well, at least they were happy. He'd just have to talk with Sintas to make sure a shopping trip like this one didn't happen again.

As he stood there staring at his wife's and daughter's purchases, Ailyn slipped past him and headed out to his ship. Once on board, she promptly searched it from end to end.

"No sign of your future husband. Dad must've stashed him somewhere." Ailyn said into her commlink as she exited the ship. It was a good thing she hadn't told him about Jaq. Considering the possible fate of her sister's boyfriend, she didn't even want to know what would happen if Dad and Luke got ahold of him. She thought the whole situation was very romantic though, in a slightly twisted sort of way.

Meanwhile, in the Fett residence there was one hell of a row going on between Boba and Sintas over what he had done to Leia's boyfriend.

"And what would you do if Ailyn got a boyfriend, shoot him?" Sintas yelled.

"Yes" Fett replied.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke looked down at his new hand. He was surprised that the rebellion had shelled out for a realistic looking prosthetic considering the budget constraints they were under, but he was grateful. At least he wasn't paying for it.

As he was flexing the fingers of his new hand, getting used to them, his sister came into the room crying. He did his best to comfort her, and ended up finding himself promising to help her find Solo before she left. Solo wasn't too bad, and he still owed the man one for that rescue at the Death Star. He knew that Solo returned his sister's feelings and would be loyal to her which was better than he could say for most of the men in the galaxy. Dad would have to learn to adjust as he had when he realized that his sister was in love with the smuggler and wouldn't be deterred.

Soon, he and his sister made their preparations to depart for parts unknown in a search for where their dad had hidden Leia's boyfriend. He and Leia in his ship, and Lando Calrissian who had stowed away aboard the Falcon before it took off and almost gotten himself spaced and Chewbacca aboard the Falcon.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett stared up at the sky wondering why an Imperial shuttle was headed straight towards his family's property, and hoping that it wasn't because of Luke. He swiftly identified the owner of the particular vessel heading towards him by its unique markings. It would appear that the day he had dreaded and tried to put off indefinitely had finally arrived. Lord Vader had discovered that he had been harboring a pair of Force sensitives and had come either to kill them or to claim them.

He found himself wishing that the twins hadn't landed a couple of minutes earlier. If only they had arrived tomorrow as expected, Vader would've missed them, and they would be safe for a little while longer.

It was a good thing that Sin and Ailyn had decided to go into town for groceries today. If they had been here, they would be dying alongside him and the twins, since he would only let Vader get his children over his dead body. At least his wife and daughter would have a chance.

Checking the charge on his blaster, he turned to face his fate.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke and Leia had been discussing possible strategies for dealing with their father and possibly worming some information out of him when they felt the shuttle come in for a landing. As they tried to figure out exactly what was going on, the comm beeped to get their attention.

"Take off now!" their father yelled over the comm "Don't worry about me, just take off!"

Luke and Leia turned to each other. They knew in their bones that if they did as their dad said, they would lose the man who had raised them since they were small children.

All too soon, the shuttle touched down, and they watched in dread as the ramp descended and Lord Vader disembarked, his lightsaber already activated. Before Vader reached the bottom of the ramp, Leia made her decision. She shot out of the ship and raced towards her father as if the hounds of hell were after her.

She would do whatever it took to save her father from the Sith lord, even lay down her very life. Luke, who had come to the same decision, was back on the ship grabbing every weapon he could reach so they would have a better chance of surviving long enough to escape.

&!&!&!&!&

Darth Vader exited his shuttle. In a few moments the bastard who dared marry his daughter despite the fact that he was far too old for her amongst other things would be dead. As he neared the end of the ramp, he saw a brown haired woman race from one of the ships on the property. It took him less than a second to realize that it was his daughter.

"Dad!" the girl, no, woman screamed as she raced towards him.

His heart stopped for a moment. She knew who her father was. This reunion was far better than he could've dreamed considering the circumstances under which they had last met.

His daughter suddenly stopped next to the bounty hunting scum who had taken advantage of her. Why was she stopping there? This didn't make any sense. She was supposed to continue straight to his arms.

"I told you and Luke to get out of here!" the bounty hunter yelled.

"Dad, I couldn't leave you!" Leia cried.

Wait, What? Somehow this father-daughter reunion had gone from a dream come true, and taken a trip to Bizarro world. His son, whom he could see descending the ramp of the ship his daughter had just exited put on the helmet that completed the armor he was wearing and was checking the charge on his blaster.

Somehow, by the end of the day, he had not only not killed Fett as he had planned but, ended up sitting on his back porch commiserating with him over Leia's choice in men.

&!&!&!&!&

Less than two weeks after the whole biological father meets daddy incident, Leia was on her way to Mandalore to find a bounty hunter who was crazy enough to be willing to help her find where her dad had hidden her future husband.

A man named Fenn Shysa ended up taking her up on the offer. They somehow managed to free Mandalore from Imperial rule during their search which had remained on planet for a while thanks to the rumor that her dad had hidden Han with some of Jango Fett's other clones, but they hadn't yet found him. To top it off, Shysa had fallen in love with her and was now following her about like a lost puppy. Telling him to get lost hadn't even put a dent in his enthusiasm. Perhaps she should introduce him to both of her fathers...

&!&!&!&!&

After a great deal of searching on his part, Lando had found Solo being used as a wall display at Jabba's palace. He got himself hired as a guard, and began plotting with Chewbacca as to how to get him out. Realizing that they would need help, he called for Luke.

Luke arrived a week later, pretending to be just another bounty hunter looking for work. While he was there, he met the most stunning redhead he had ever seen. After spending a week getting to know her, and remembering the stories his dad had told him about mom, and the story his biological father had told him about how he'd fallen in love with his mother, he came to a decision. Han could keep for a while, and now that Leia knew where he was she could retrieve him herself. He was going to head out to find the rarest and most beautiful Heart of Fire there was for his future bride.

&!&!&!&!&

Mara Jade watched the receding form of Luke Skywalker who had come to Jabba's palace disguised as one of the Fett Twins. Besides being rather difficult to kill, he wasn't what her master had led her to expect him to be. He wouldn't live long if he kept wearing that armor though, either the real Fett or a real Mandalorian would make sure of that.

Less than a week later, she found herself completely stunned and bewildered by Skywalker. He had returned to Jabba's palace where she was still posing as a slave girl in hopes of catching whoever came to Solo's rescue and using them as bait in order to lure Skywalker back, and gave her a rather large and expensive gemstone on a silver chain after proposing to her. Was he insane? She had tried to kill him thirteen times.

She was about to make attempt number fourteen when a sudden and rather loud commotion distracted her.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke watched his sister empty her blaster into the head of the once formidable crime-lord Jabba the Hutt while the Mandalore himself released Solo from carbonite. Dad wasn't going to be happy about this. Jabba used to pay rather well, and now he was a vast mound of rapidly cooling flesh. Whatever he had said to her had obviously pissed her off really badly.

Hopefully, killing Jabba would be worth having his allies come after her for killing him.

Leia jumped off the dais after emptying a five-hundred shot clip into the head of her father's best customer. Anyone who even thought of trying to force her into their harem would get the same. When daddy heard half of the things Jabba had said to her, he would agree with her decision. Hopefully, he wouldn't treat her like a kid and ground her afterward.

As soon as she was clear of the dias, she ran to her newly freed future husband and started kissing him. Nothing else in the universe mattered at that moment but Han.

Mandalore Fenn Shysa stared down at the kissing couple. He had lost out to a space bum for now. At the moment, his beloved only had eyes for the man in front of her. But, he would find a way to correct that problem, even if it meant causing a fatal accident that couldn't be tracked back to him. He had loved his dear Leia from the moment he laid eyes on her. The time she had slammed him headfirst into a tree for trying to kiss her had made him love her even more. He would never have been able to free his people without her help. She was the most precious thing in the galaxy to him. He would do anything for her, and he wouldn't give her up without a fight.

&!&!&!&!&

Darth Vader was sitting in a speeder on Tatooine sorting through the album of holos that Fett had taken of his children while he waited for Boba Fett to return from his task. The images in the album had started when both children were about seven years old. As he studied them, he quietly wished that it was him instead of Fett sitting in each one of the family shots. Fett who had gone into Jabba's palace to take care of the Emperor's Hand who was waiting to assassinate Luke the next time he arrived, since if he did it himself, the Emperor would know, and would become aware of what he was planning.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett quietly took in the scene before him. His best and oldest customer now had a pile of burnt flesh and goo for a head. Luke was standing next to the Emperor's servant who appeared to be too stunned to say anything. There was a Heart-of-Fire on a chain dangling from her right hand. The Mandalore himself was flicking the safety on his blaster off and on while watching Leia make out with the space bum who had been freed from his carbonite prison. He turned on his heel and left.

"Something wrong?" Darth Vader asked when he reached the speeder.

"Children." he said with a sigh, "Leave them alone for ten minutes and they destroy half the house."

**Edited 3-14-12**


	15. Jabba's Palace Aftermath

Leia knew that she was going to get it as soon as things calmed down. It took longer than normal for things to do so because of the whole incident with Mara Jade. Both dad and Vader had told Luke that he most definitely would not be marrying one of the Emperor's hands, and had done so in front of said hand who was still holding the Heart of Fire pendant that Luke had given her as if she wasn't certain what she was supposed to be doing with it.

Mara Jade had then requested clarification on the use of the multiple in the Emperor's Hand bit, and threw one hell of a fit when she learned that she wasn't the only one. Apparently, the Emperor had several one of a kind assistants that he'd trained in the use of the Force and gave the moniker "Emperor's Hand" to, and Vader knew at least five of them. Most, if not all, of the Hands that Vader knew believed that they were the only one, something Vader had found exceedingly amusing.

It was at that point that Mara Jade who wasn't entirely consumed by the Dark Side of the Force quit her job for the Empire then and there and stormed off to dress in something appropriate and get transportation to somewhere that wasn't a sweltering sandpit. Luke followed after the woman he considered to be his future bride in order to comfort her, and had nearly gotten himself stabbed by her for his troubles. If a relationship formed between those two, it was sure to be interesting to say the least.

Eventually, after the group had broken up to deal with various tasks, Vader to get back to what he had been supposed to be doing when he went out to Tatooine which was to inspect some space station or something, Luke to follow after Mara Jade some more, Han, Chewie, and Lando to prep the Falcon for departure, and Fenn Shysa to do whatever it was he did when he wasn't following her around, Leia found herself alone with her father.

For a while, her dad looked too pissed to speak.

"Was it worth ruining your life in order to get Solo back?" he said eventually.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"You killed Jabba the Hutt. His family will come after you. His minions will come after you. They're going to put a bounty on your head so high that every bounty hunter but me, Luke Sintas, and Ailyn will come after you. You will spend a long time on the run until you are able to prove that killing you won't be worth the cost of doing so, and even then you'll still have to look over your shoulder every day until you die. Is Solo of all people worth all that?" he replied, looking upset and worried rather than angry now.

"Yes." she said eventually. Force help her, he was. She loved him. She loved him more than life itself. Even a short life on the run was better than a life without Han.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba Fett turned away from his daughter who undoubtedly already had a death mark on her, blaming himself for what had happened. It had been his fault. If he hadn't played that stupid, immature game with his daughter, and hidden Solo with Jabba, none of this would have happened. Sin had warned him, but no, he had to believe that he was right and that Leia would just get over her crush on the smuggler and find someone more suitable.

To make matters worse, the Mandalore who was absolutely smitten with Leia didn't seem to be above pulling something underhanded to win her affections If he killed Solo, Leia would kill him, which was something he didn't need right now. Especially since the Mandalore had a bunch of friends, and had become even more popular since Mandalore had been freed from Imperial control.

On the surface, Shysa seemed to be a better suitor for Leia than the space bum turned Rebel General, but the fact remained that the man was even older than Solo. Being in his early forties, he was most definitely too old for Leia.

None of that really mattered now though. Solo wouldn't be able to protect Leia, Shysa wouldn't be able to protect Leia, and there was a good chance that even he wouldn't be able to protect Leia, and it had all been his fault.

&!&!&!&!&

Mara Jade stormed away from her exceedingly persistent pursuer, seething at the injustice of it all. She had done things that had gone against her morals, things that had turned her stomach and left her with nightmares, all out of loyalty for a man who had no such loyalty for her, though he had claimed otherwise. She had gone through all she had gone through believing that she had been special, that she had been important, that if she'd just been good enough the Emperor would have actually cared about her.

She knew that Vader hadn't been lying about her not being the only Emperor's Hand. She knew when that monstrosity was lying and when he wasn't, and she could feel that he wasn't at that time. It explained the barely repressed humor that she had sensed from him over the years when she spoke of being the Emperor's Hand during their encounters. He'd known what the joke was long before she did.

The Emperor had never cared for her. As far as the Emperor had been concerned, she was expendable. He had any number of Hands that he could call forth if she failed in her task. He had probably even expected her to either be killed by a Jedi Luke Skywalker during one of her assassination attempts as a test of Skywalker's skill, or by Vader himself after he had learned what she'd done to his son.

She wished she could be there when the Sleemo Emperor came face to face with Luke Skywalker, or Luke Fett rather. It'd be funny to watch that old man's plans blow up in his face when he discovered that the younger Fett wasn't what he'd expected him to be. Chances were, when the Emperor's plans blew up in his face, the rest of him would blow up shortly afterward.

&!&!&!&!&

Darth Vader stepped back aboard the Death Star, knowing that his absence had most definitely not gone unnoticed. When he had learned that his children, Padme's children were in danger, he had gone to them, heedless of the consequences.

He had heard a rumor that one of the Emperor's Hands had been sent to Tatooine in order to assassinate Luke when he came to rescue the Rebel General Han Solo who had been decorating Jabba's Throne Room. Intelligence had indicated that it had been Mara Jade who was both one of the Emperor's most competent hands, as well as the one who had liked him the least who had been sent. He had left the Death Star which he was supposed to be inspecting, calling Fett on the way to Tatooine, prepared to back the Bounty Hunter up should he fail to protect the young man he saw as a son.

He had taken a distinct pleasure in severing the link that insured Mara Jade's loyalty to the Emperor and gave him the ability to control her to a degree after the events in Jabba's Throne room. He had enjoyed the look on the young woman's face as she learned that she wasn't the only Hand, and that she was in fact expendable.

He wasn't too happy that his son had become smitten with the woman, nor was he too happy with the fact that he'd proposed to her. Mara Jade hadn't seemed too happy with these facts either. But, if his son was anything like himself, he knew that he would have his way despite what he and Fett told him, and Mara Jade would eventually become his daughter in law. Hopefully, that day would be a long time in coming.

He wasn't too happy about Leia's pursuit of Solo, but he was a much better pick than many of the other men out there. The man had been thrown out of the Imperial Navy because he was trying to save the life of a slave which was a bonus in his book, even if the slave in question had been captured due to his terrorist activities against the Empire, and therefore was more of a convict. He had shown afterward that he had a sense of honor in his battles against the Empire, which was more than most Rebels had.

If it weren't for the fact that it would break his daughter's heart and destroy what little good will she had towards him, he would still kill Solo irregardless of his positive qualities.

Fortunately for his remaining health, he had arrived back at the Death Star about five minutes before the Emperor did which meant that he wouldn't be punished for not being here to greet the old man. He'd had to rush a bit, but the instant before the ramp of the Emperor's shuttle lowered, he was in position in front of the officers at the head of the troops who had come to greet their leader.

&!&!&!&!&

Luke was alone aboard his ship since Leia had decided to go with Han and join the Rebellion, this time of her own volition. He received a message from the planet Dagobah, apparently the old troll was dying, and wanted to see him one last time.

Despite the fact that the troll was a Jedi, he had decided he'd honor his request. The troll had been nice to him, and hadn't tried to turn him into a Jedi like Kenobi had, not caring that he hadn't wanted to be a Jedi.

Being taken by Kenobi had been one of the most traumatic experiences he'd gone through during his childhood. It had also served to prove that his dad had been telling him the truth that Kenobi would have stolen him from his family if he hadn't taken him first. Who knew what Kenobi would have done to his family if they had continued to refuse his demands?

There was another problem that would have happened had he continued to stay with his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. They had been living on borrowed time. Only an idiot would have failed to put together the facts that a Skywalker was living with Anakin Skywalker's step-brother. As soon as someone realized who he was, odds were that he would have been turned over to the Empire so fast that he would have thought he'd teleported.

If that had happened, he would have died, or been made a slave to the Emperor who would have taken great pleasure in using him to hurt or even kill his birth father.

It had all worked out in the end though. His dad had taken him, and the Empire hadn't gotten their hands at him. He had skills that enabled him to survive on his own, and a name that would strike fear in the hearts of his enemies.

&!&!&!&!&

Fenn Shysa angrily slammed the disconnect button on his ship's comm. He'd called the Skiratas in order to arrange a little accident for Solo so he could be there for his sweetheart. Kad had been the one to answer the comm, rather than his uncle Jaing whom he'd been hoping to reach. When he had explained why he wanted Solo dead, Kad replied "You want to marry Leia? Well, get in line."

If it weren't for the fact that he was certain that the Skiratas would kill him, he would arrange a little "accident" for Kad as well.

&!&!&!&!&

Han Solo wasn't smiling after he fielded calls from both Boba Fett and Darth Vader. Both calls said pretty much the same thing, that neither man saw him as a fit suitor for their daughter and that if he ever broke her heart, there wouldn't be enough of him left to identify. He had no intention of letting that happen. Not only for the sake of his hide, but because of the fact that he had fallen deeply in love with Leia, and couldn't see himself hurting the woman who had been willing to risk her life for him.


End file.
